


Genius+Billionaire+Philanthropist

by JustAnotherWriter (N1ghtshade)



Category: Iron Man (Movies), MacGyver (TV 2016)
Genre: Gen, Iron Man AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-25
Updated: 2019-02-25
Packaged: 2019-11-05 05:07:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 24,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17912561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/N1ghtshade/pseuds/JustAnotherWriter
Summary: There’s a whining screech and something thuds into the sand nearby. Mac barely has time to see that it’s some sort of rocket grenade when there’s a painful high-pitched sound, and an even more painful explosion.The world is a chaos of fire and heat. And then he’s flying backward, hitting the hot sand hard. His back hurts, but his chest feels like it’s on fire, and he wonders if he’s been burned. He glances down and sees blood spreading over the tan fabric of his shirt. His hands scrabble at the cloth, ripping buttons until he can see shards of metal and blood welling quickly over them. And then he passes out.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to slightly_ajar for the suggestion to do this AU!

Mac shoves the tent canvas aside, blinking in the already scorching heat of the Afghan desert. _Home, for the next three weeks._ At this point, any place he goes feels like home. He’s spent more time in foreign countries for the last few years than he has in his own house. _Not that that house ever really felt like home either. Not with no family in it but me._

Mac’s father disappeared without a trace when he was ten. At first, everyone assumed the engineering billionaire had been kidnapped for ransom. Every government agency poured resources and men into tracking down the smallest clues, the most ridiculous possibilities, the plethora of dead ends. It was like James had fallen off the earth.

He was never the same after Mac’s mom died, five years before that. He’d thrown himself into his inventions, and his work at the factory. Mac barely ever saw him anyway, so him vanishing wasn’t quite as surprising to Mac as it seemed to be to the grown-ups. As far as Mac was concerned, his dad had disappeared a long time ago.

James’s partner Jonah Walsh took over the family business. He’d told Mac, at the funeral they finally held for his father, that James had told him to make sure the company thrived until his son was ready to take his place. Mac has been content to let the man, who’s like an uncle to him, handle the business, even though he just turned twenty-six and could certainly take over. Walsh is making the company thrive. Mac isn’t into corporate politics, so letting Walsh run MacGyver Industries leaves him free to do what he loves, invent things and help people.

He finished a mechanical engineering degree at MIT three years ago, but he discovered his real passion when he went on a spring break trip to do hurricane relief work in Puerto Rico. _What I really love doing is helping people._ Mac enjoys being in the labs, he loves finding a better, easier way to do something, and he _loves_ making things blow up. But there was something about really getting his hands dirty in the real world that made the kid who grew up with everything handed to him ridiculously proud of himself and delighted. _It’s not that I feel like these people need_ me _to come in here and help them. It’s more that I need them. To remind me of what’s really important._

Sometimes Mac feels guilty that he gets to go home at the end of the week, the month, whatever, to a beautiful house in the Hollywood Hills. To a life that doesn’t put him at risk of serious injury, disease, or attack on a daily basis. _What did I do to deserve that? Nothing._ So he does what he can, where he can. He’s hardly ever home anymore. S.P.A.R.K.I., the AI his personal assistant/tech developer Riley Davis designed to run his house while he’s gone, makes sure the place is fine.

He’s been home for a grand total of three weeks so far this year. He just finished a three-month project in a village in Nigeria that was recovering after an oil well fire that he helped put out with some experimental specialized equipment. The fire was out in days, but the village had suffered some extensive damage, and he’d been able to help with some of the rebuilding and even learned about one of the farmers’ methods of a sustainable crop rotation that he wants to spend more time looking into soon. He really needs to remember to call the village teacher, Nasha, at some point; they’d spent a lot of time together working on repairing the old clinic equipment, and she’s as mechanically minded as Mac. _Long distance relationships don’t usually go well, but it might be worth trying. She liked me for me, not for what my name means in the corporate world_ . Riley’s done nothing but tease, but Mac hasn’t had a serious relationship since Penny Parker his sophomore year in college. _Nikki Carpenter doesn’t count._ He wants to forget that woman exists, but that’s proving hard to do.

Lots of people want to date a genius billionaire. Not as many are interested when they get to know the guy who spends most of his life in the most dangerous, poorest locations in the world, who gives away money to almost anyone who asks for it, and routinely gets so absorbed in a new project he stands up his dates. But Nasha seemed to get it…

And maybe his publicity agent, Wilt Bozer, will stop trying to get him into hot dates with the newest girls on the Hollywood scene. Bozer came to LA four years ago pitching film scripts, the starving artist type. He didn’t make it to the silver screen, but he did manage to get a part time job writing TV spots for the new product launch of a desalination water purifier Mac had just developed. The guy has a way with words, and he’s been kept on permanently. Mac appreciates having someone to help write his press appearance scripts; he’s been known to wander off on tangents of technical jargon that confuse everyone.

The camp is coming alive, the technical and medical teams that accompany him packing their gear to roll out. They’ve finished repairing a small clinic that was destroyed by a bombing, and their next destination is a town that’s building a new surgery wing onto their hospital, one that will be supplied with the new nanotech equipment Mac’s been working on for the past year. Mac grabs his own duffel and tosses it into the humvee he’s going to be traveling in.

The area is fairly dangerous, but Mac has an great person to watch his back, a former Delta with plenty of experience...and a definite lack of appreciation for civilians in active combat zones. Jack Dalton is rough around the edges, and a real pain when he jokes about Mac’s name and calls him “Carl’s Jr.” and “hamburger kid”, but it’s been four years and they haven’t killed each other yet.

He met Jack when repairing a power station in Bangladesh after a hurricane ended with him and his crew in the middle of a hostage situation. Apparently a group of anti-government extremists decided kidnapping someone worth billions would get them the money, and attention, they wanted.

When a Delta team showed up to storm the place and rescue the hostages, one of the soldiers stepped in front of Mac just before one of the men holding them hostage shot him. The Delta, a Sergeant Jack Dalton, ended up with a bullet in his chest, and Mac ended up with a lot of guilt and a debt to repay.

Jack got medically discharged, and the second he woke up in the hospital Mac was there with the hiring forms. Jack insisted he didn’t want to be hired out of pity. But he was more than willing to, as he put it ‘keep a brain that’s gonna save the world inside the body of a skinny little kid with no sense of self-preservation.’ And Mac jokes about bringing home a crippled war vet. But they’d die for each other and they both know it.

Jack’s Texas accent is clearly noticeable as he shouts across the camp, checking on the status of the teams packing up. His and Mac’s own humvee is loaded already; they’re the first ones to arrive on a site. Jack, to assess the safety, Mac, to see what’s most important to be tackled first. By the time the rest of the convoy arrives, they usually have a plan in place already.

Mac climbs in the vehicle across from Jack. He used to drive, but since Jack started, Mac’s never had reason to put his hands on the wheel when they’re out of the country. Jack’s insanely good at navigating mountain switchbacks, flooded terrain, and even literal minefields.

Jack’s just put the vehicle in drive when Mac sees something on his side, and hears yelling. At first he assumes one of his team has a question before they roll out, but he quickly realizes whoever it is is shouting in Farsi, not English. And they’re far too short to be anyone from his team. It’s a young boy, in dusty clothes, rushing toward them.

“Wait!” The boy waves a scarf frantically. “Please!”

“Stop!” Mac’s already opening the vehicle door. He can’t leave someone like this. The whole reason they’re here is to help people. And Mac can’t justify hurrying on to make their scheduled stop at the next location with leaving behind someone who’s come to them asking them for help. _I can’t do that._ It’s not up to him to decide who needs their help and who doesn’t. _We have to stop._

Jack knows him well enough to know that Mac isn’t going to change his mind. He stops the humvee in a cloud of dust and Mac jumps out, hurrying over to the boy. His Farsi is still pretty poor; he’s only had two weeks of practice so far, but he’s going to try. Mac puts his hands gently on the boy’s shoulders. “What’s happened? What do you need?” He’s pretty sure he’s mangling the words horrifically, and he knows he is when the boy answers him in English.

“The well. It collapsed. We have no water.”

The boy looks exhausted, probably severely dehydrated if he had to walk any distance to get to this camp. Mac pulls his canteen off its strap and hands it to him. “Don’t drink too much, or too fast, or it will make you sick.” The boy nods, opening the canteen and taking a few small sips. “Where are you from? Where’s the well?”

The boy wipes his mouth on his dusty sleeve and hands the canteen back to Mac. “A day’s walk, that way. There are many people too old or sick to leave the village. If we have no well, they will die.”

Mac nods. “We’re going to come help, okay? You can show us where the village is on a map, but then you should stay here with one of our medical teams, at least until they make sure you’re okay.” Mac’s worried about serious complications depending on how long the kid’s gone without any water. _We’ll go on ahead, a well should be a couple days’ work at most._

Mac grabs a map and when the boy points out the approximate location of his village, Mac marks it in pen and walks back to the humvee, where Jack is still waiting. “Looks like this is where we’re headed now.”

“Mac, that’s bad country up there.” Something’s very wrong when Jack sounds like that.

“I got you watching my back, you’re not gonna let anything happen to me.”

“Kid, there’s been a lot of guerilla fighting up there.” Jack’s hands are clenched tightly around the steering wheel.

“And these people are trapped in the middle of it.” Mac says. “They live with that every day. The least we can do is risk it for a few days to try to help them.” Mac picks up the radio and switches it so all the members of the convoy can hear.

“We’re rerouting to assist with an emergency. There’s a collapsed well in a village north of here, and I’m not going to leave them without at least trying to help.” He swallows. “I’m not asking you all to come with me. It’s going to be dangerous.”

He feels an enormous weight of responsibility as each of their units in turn tells him they’ll back him up. _I’m dragging all of us into an active war zone._ He knows that’s what all of these people knew they were signing on for, but at least half of them are college kids; Mac can’t imagine how devastated their families would be, even if they knew their son or daughter had died trying to help people and do the right thing.

“We’ll go ahead, Jack’s going to check out the lay of the land and we’ll tell you if it’s safe to proceed.” That’s the most he can do. He trusts Jack’s judgment. _Jack wouldn’t take me into a place he thought was going to get me killed._

Jack hits the radio he’s brought with them, and AC/DC’s “Back in Black” blasts out. Mac swears the entire CD library Jack owns is either Willie Nelson or classic rock. He’s been playing the same things since Mac’s known him, and despite the fact that Mac made him a little player with all the songs downloaded on it, that’s virtually indestructible and that Jack can carry with him anywhere, Jack prefers his scratched CDs that skip every third track and have multiple rough spots. He’s oddly nostalgic, but Mac finds that endearing. _He’s like every good movie dad, with his old music and bad jokes._ Sometimes, when they’re out here, just the two of them, he feels like the dad Mac’s never had. _Not that Walsh isn’t great too. But he’s always so busy with the company._ Jack’s the one who does cliche “dad” stuff like take Mac fishing.

It’s not too long before Jack shuts off the music, in the middle of "Highway to Hell", and starts looking around at the mountains. “We’re comin’ up on a pretty narrow pass here. These places are prime ambush spots.” Jack’s slowed them down, he’s probably looking for any sign of a military presence in the hills.

Mac follows his gaze, searching for any glint of light on metal, or any sign of movement. And then there’s an explosion, a massive, earth-shaking one that sends the humvee skidding and throws Mac against the window.

They skid off the road, thankfully not rolling over, but Mac can smell fire and fuel and that’s not good. And then a hail of bullets strafes the driver’s side of the humvee and he hears Jack grunt, probably hit.

Mac flings his door open, unlatches Jack’s seatbelt, and yanks them both out into the sand. Jack is scarily pale, there’s a red graze on the side of his head, and a couple more spots starting to ooze through his pants at the hip and his shirt at the shoulder.

Mac can hear yelling and boots thudding, whoever attacked them is coming. But they’re on the other side of the car, which buys him a few minutes. _This can’t be happening._ It doesn’t feel real, even though the blood under his hands is scarily warm and flowing and the desert heat is beating down on them. _It can’t be real. This can’t be actually happening._ Mac has been in a lot of dangerous situations before, but Jack’s never been hurt, not like this, since Bangladesh.

“Jack!” Mac tugs at the man’s body. He’s not leaving Jack to die.

They’re half under the shadow of a low hill, and there are a lot of boulders and smaller rocks that have rolled down from the hillside, probably eaten away by sandstorms. Mac can see a few big ones that might give them a chance at not being seen.

He pulls Jack behind the largest rock. It’s not a great hiding place, but it’s far enough away from the ruined vehicle that maybe no one will think to check here for someone they probably assume was seriously wounded…

Their footprints. Mac’s left a clear drag trail. He needs to cover that up. He pulls off his jacket and starts to rush back toward where the line from Jack’s feet first becomes visible, planning to brush away the tracks in the sand.

There’s a whining screech and something thuds into the sand nearby. Mac barely has time to see that it’s some sort of rocket grenade when there’s a painful high-pitched sound, and an even more painful explosion.

The world is a chaos of fire and heat. And then he’s flying backward, hitting the hot sand hard. His back hurts, but his chest feels like it’s on fire, and he wonders if he’s been burned. He glances down and sees blood spreading over the tan fabric of his shirt. His hands scrabble at the cloth, ripping buttons until he can see shards of metal and blood welling quickly over them. And then he passes out.

* * *

Jack wakes up in a field hospital knowing something is wrong. His hand feels empty. _Where’s Mac?_ Something has to be very wrong for them to be keeping him away from the kid.

He blinks, the rough ceiling tiles overhead fading in and out of focus. It feels like every other time he’s taken a hit in the ‘sandbox’. He can feel the burning ache in his shoulder and hip, but they’ve got him on the good stuff so it’s just a minor inconvenience. The most aggravating thing is the slightly rough bandage wrapped around his head wound, it’s making his forehead itch.

And then a hand does find his, and there’s a momentary flash of relief before he realizes this hand has long nails and no random calluses except on the fingertips. _Riley._

“They thought you might not wake up.” Her voice is tearful. “It’s been three days, Jack.” She sniffs. “I couldn’t lose you too.”

 _Too? Oh God no._ Mac should have been safe. Jack’s side of the humvee took the hit. _If I made it, he definitely should have. “_ Mac…” He manages to croak out.

“He’s gone.” Riley takes a deep, shuddering breath. “You were lucky to survive, a patrol chopper happened to see the explosion and called it in. The medical crew found you in a coma. But...Mac…” She takes another breath. “They couldn’t find him. His blood was everywhere, but...there wasn’t a body.”

Jack turns toward her, just a little, trying not to dislodge any of the wires and tubes surrounding him.

Riley has a black tank top, olive cargo pants, and messy curls in a ponytail under a camo cap. She looks more dangerous...and scared...than Jack’s ever seen her. “I flew out as soon as I heard. I’ve been here since they got you stabilized.” She tightens her fingers in his. “Now that you’re awake they’re probably going to transport you stateside. It was too risky before.”

“I have to find him.” Jack shakes his head. “I’m not leaving till they can bring Mac home too.”

“There are search teams combing the area now. But...he wouldn’t have left you unless he was forced to, you know that. Someone either took him while he was alive, or they took his body.” She shakes her head. “We might never know what happened.”

“He’s not dead,” Jack practically growls. “I would know if he was dead.” He shoves himself into a sitting position, heedless of the monitors, nurses, and pain that are all trying to convince him that’s a terrible idea. Somewhere out there, Mac is in the hands of monsters. Jack’s mind can conjure up a dozen scenarios, none of them good.

 _If we haven’t gotten a ransom demand, and it’s been two days…_ Sadly, this is not even close to the first time someone’s decided Mac’s company fortune makes him a good kidnapping target. _Honestly they’d be better off to just ask._ Jack knows the kid would probably just give them the money without a second thought. He’s got the kind of attitude about it that growing up with money doesn’t always give people. _It didn’t ruin him, it made him almost recklessly generous._

Jack remembers finding out who he was going to rescue, the first time he heard Angus MacGyver’s name somewhere other than on a TV interview or the cover of a science or society magazine in the checkout line. _When I found out our mission was to rescue him, I figured we’d be dealing with some ungrateful entitled schmuck who’d complain that we got mud on his shoes._ Instead, Jack had woken up in the hospital to guilt-filled puppy eyes and a generous lifetime work contract. The kid is everything Jack’s always wished people in his position would be, and that’s the reason he’s been so determined to keep his overly trusting little genius alive. _The world can’t afford to lose Angus MacGyver._

Kidnappings are one thing. Then it’s in the bad guys’ best interest to keep Mac alive, somewhat healthy, and uninjured. But Jack can’t ignore that there are other options. _That area’s known for being a hotspot for human trafficking._ Jack honestly doesn’t know how Mac made it as long as he did without Jack watching his back. _He was a college kid, with no backup but a bunch of other nerds, working in some of the most dangerous places in the world._ Jack knows Mac’s pretty fearless, and that scares him. _Anyone could have lured him away by asking him for help, and then done whatever they wanted to him._ Mac’s tough, and a scrappy fighter, but he’s no match for people like that. And he spends entirely too much time in places where someone pretty and clearly not local would be an easy mark.

And then Riley’s hand is on his shoulder, pushing him back down gently. “Jack, please, everyone is doing everything they can. Whatever Mac did, he probably did it to save your life. Please, don’t make the last thing he chose to do a waste.”

* * *

When Mac wakes up, his first thought is that he’s gone blind. He blinks, but he can’t see anything. He takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly, trying to calm himself, and then he sees the pale mist fogging up in front of his face. The breath makes him cough, which sets off a series of hacking gasps, his body is rebelling at something wrong in his throat.

He shudders, dragging at the tube someone’s stuck in his nose. He gasps and chokes at the feel of the slimy thing. _What’s happening?_ It doesn’t feel like he’s in a hospital; it’s too dark. And too cold. He’s shivering uncontrollably.

Now that he’s a bit more aware, he can see a few things. He’s lying on his back on some kind of cot, and when he turns his head he can see a table beside him with a small mug on it. His throat feel dry and raspy after that coughing spell, and he reaches slowly for the mug, wincing at the pain the movement causes in his chest.

His hands are shaking, and his fingers knock the tin mug to the floor. He wants to cry with frustration and pain and fear. He rolls to reach it and something tugs him backward, setting off a blindingly searing pain in the middle of his chest.

“I wouldn’t move too much if I were you,” A voice mutters from the other side of the room. He glances over to see a man standing in front of a chipped mirror, shaving his neck and watching Mac in the reflection. Mac glances at what stopped him, wires coming from a battery on the table beside his bed. Wires that disappear under the cloth covering his chest.

Mac’s shuddering hands follow the path of the wires from the car battery to his chest...to the bloodstained bandages...He rips them away, feeling a piece of metal embedded in his skin. He would scream but the pressure on his lungs is too much for that.

“It’s an electromagnet,” the man says, walking over and readjusting the bandages with a scolding shake of his head.

“Wh-why?” Mac chokes out around the grinding pressure in his chest. He feels like someone’s stepping on him. No, not just stepping on him, like their boot’s gone down through his ribs into his body. Like something is crowding out his lungs. He can’t get a real breath, he’s just shallowly gasping.

“When you were caught in the explosion, shrapnel was driven into your chest. I removed what I could, but I didn’t have the tools to do the kind of surgery it would have taken to remove it all. The shrapnel was going into your heart. The electromagnet is stopping it.” The man brushes Mac’s sweaty hair off his forehead. “That is the only thing keeping you alive. Don’t touch it.” Mac shivers. _That...thing...is inside me._ He feels sick. He can barely breathe and there’s a _hole_ in his chest. With a _magnet_ in it.

He chokes back a laugh, because that would hurt, at what Jack would say about this. He’d start ranting about cyborgs and the rise of the machines... _Jack? Where’s Jack?_

He coughs, and it hurts, but he has to speak now, he has to ask. Because Jack should be here, right here, with him. Jack wouldn’t let them take him away from Mac, unless something was horribly, horribly wrong. “There was a soldier with me. Where is he?”

“You were the only survivor they found.” Mac swallows a sob. _Jack’s dead._

* * *

Time doesn’t pass normally in here. Mac doesn’t know how many days have gone by since the explosion. How long it’s been since he’s woken up. Every once in a while his fellow captive goes to the door and takes a tray of food from someone there, but Mac doesn’t know if they’re been fed three meals a day or just once. He sleeps most of the time, too weak to get up from the bed. The one time he tried his chest constricted painfully and he thought he might fall. And falling would be really bad when he’s attached to that battery.

The man talks to him, despite the fact that Mac stubbornly refuses to even try to answer, and Mac learns that his name is Alfred Pena, that he used to be an EOD tech, and that he’s from California. Mac misses home. He just wants to get out of here and go back and for this to just be a bad memory. But home means Jack, too, and Jack is never going to be there again.

He thinks his body is slowly getting used to the foreign _thing_ in it. His breathing has started to even out, probably his body adjusting to the diminished lung capacity. Pena keeps insisting Mac needs to get up and walk around. He doesn’t want to, he doesn’t want to _live_ if Jack’s gone, but something dutiful and sounding very Jack-like in his head tells him Jack wouldn’t want him to do that. _Jack did everything he could to keep you alive. If that was also the last thing he did, you owe it to him to keep on living._

It feels like a small miracle when Pena gets him on his feet and helps him walk halfway across the room. Mac feels miserable and everything hurts, but he’s walking. He has to carry the car battery around with him, and that exhausts him even faster.

It feels like not too long after that that someone pounds on the door, much more insistently than they do when they bring food. Pena looks nervous, more shaken than Jack’s ever seen the normally calm man. “Stand up. Do what I do.” Mac does, putting his hands behind his head even though the motion pulls at his battered chest and draws tears.

The door opens, and five men step in. Four are carrying guns, and they have the general look Mac’s come to associate with foot soldiers, some sort of hired underlings. But the fifth man strikes him as someone with at least some authority, especially when he begins talking.

Mac doesn’t know this language. It’s not the dialect of Farsi he learned. He glances at Pena, who seems to understand what’s being said. When Mac hears his own name, he flinches. The man stops talking, and Pena says something that Mac thinks might be a request to translate. He does understand when the newcomer says yes.

Pena turns to Mac. “He says your reputation precedes you, Angus MacGyver.” The man continues talking, Mac can make out about one word in ten. Not only is the dialogue unfamiliar, the man talks so rapidly. Mac’s still fuzzy brain is struggling to keep up.

He’s glad Pena continues to translate. “He wants you to build a missile. Something called the Jericho.” Mac shivers. He’s heard of that weapon; a missile capable of not only doing mass damage across a wide area, but also of creating an EMP shockwave capable of knocking out everything electronic in its path. Mac thinks there are better uses for people’s intelligence than making more efficient ways to kill as many people as possible.

“I won’t.”

Apparently they understand enough English to know what that means.

It’s not even a surprise when the response to his defiance is for them to pull a bag over Mac’s head and drag him away. Mac’s got an unfortunate habit of pissing off people who want him to do things he’s not comfortable with. Usually it results in scathing remarks from people in the DOD or private weapons firms. This time, it’s getting him tortured.

He’s expecting a beating, maybe. So when he’s suddenly shoved to his knees and has his head pushed underwater, he gasps in shock and gets a mouthful of water. He can’t breathe. The water is cold and filthy. He can’t let it get in his already weak and damaged lungs. Jack used to tell him about waterboarding...maybe it’s a good thing Jack’s gone. Mac wouldn’t want these people to torture _him,_ and they’d figure out soon that he and Jack were each other’s weaknesses. _They can’t hurt me now._

They pull him out just as he feels like he can’t hold his breath any longer, but just as quickly he’s shoved back under, this time farther. He feels the splash of the water hit his chest, and the electrical short it causes makes him shudder and take an involuntary breath. He coughs and splutters, but there’s no relief.

Despite the situation, the logical, mechanical side of his brain is still hard at work. The water’s shorting out the battery, the magnet is going to stop working. The shrapnel’s going to start crawling into his heart again. He just has to hold out until he dies. _That’s irony for you._ Unless of course they just drown him right here.

But these guys aren’t total idiots. They know Mac can’t give them what they want if he’s dead. So they don’t push him to the breaking point. Instead, they yank him out and shove him, stumbling, down multiple passageways until he feels a fresh, chilly breeze hitting his wet clothes. He shivers.

Someone yanks the head covering off, and Mac blinks at the sudden light. He’s standing in the mouth of a cave, overlooking a valley that’s become a weapons stockpile. He can see guns, rocket launchers, boxes of grenades. _They weren’t wrong about this area being a guerilla hideout. If I’m even still in that part of Afghanistan._ Wherever this is, it’s cold, so it’s either mountains, or more time has passed than he thought.

He jumps at Pena’s voice next to him; he wonders whether the man had to watch him be tortured. “He says you have everything here you need; that he knows improvising is your specialty. He says when you build him the weapon, he will let you go.”

Mac laughs, feeling the water in his lungs. “That’s a lie.” It’s not like it’s the first time he’s heard something like this. Except last time the demand was for money. And last time Jack showed up to save him. Now Jack’s dead, and he’s alone.

The man holding him punches him in the stomach, and Mac leans over, nearly dropping the car battery, not that it’s doing any good anyway, and coughs, spitting water and blood onto the ground. And then the hood is shoved over his head and he’s dragged back into the darkness.

* * *

Mac pushes away the meager plate of food Pena offers him. “I’m not hungry.”

“You should eat. You need to get your strength back after everything.”

“There’s no point.” Mac taps the magnet. “When they were shoving my head underwater, it shorted out the battery connection. This magnet isn’t helping me anymore.”

Pena sighs.

“I’ll be dead in a week anyway.” Mac shrugs, he can’t bring himself to care. Jack would care, but Jack is gone, dead, because Mac couldn’t save him. So it doesn’t matter. “Then they won’t get what they want.”

“So, you’re just going to roll over and fade away? Is that how you want to be remembered? Do you want to disappear like that?”

 _That hurts._ Mac’s spent his life trying to do better than his dad. He can’t be remembered for vanishing just like that man did. _True, I don’t have a child to miss me, but it would kill Riley and Bozer._

But whether he wants to survive or not, he can’t. The magnet in his chest isn’t working anymore. That shrapnel is going to tear into his heart and kill him. Unless…

Mac isn’t a weapons guy. But he’s spent enough time with Jack, who is a nerd of all things that can kill you, to know the components of a lot of guns, missiles, and bombs. And Pena was military, EOD. If Mac can break down some of those weapons he saw in the camp...he might be able to build a solution to his problem.

“Pena, you’re going to have to trust me. Because I have to tell them I’m going to build that missile.”

 


	2. Chapter 2

Jack thinks the PT doctors should be calling him a medical miracle instead of every bad name they can think of.  _ I’m recovering faster than anyone they’ve ever had in here. _ True, that’s because he’s been pushing himself past the breaking point every day, but they’ve learned not to try and stop him. 

He drags himself back to his hospital room exhausted every night. They won’t let him go home, probably because they don’t trust him not to work himself to death there, and neither Riley nor Bozer will in any way help expedite the process. They’re worried about him too. 

Jack knows he should eat, and the food he’s getting is actually sort of decent. He appreciates the nights Riley smuggles him in pizza or Bozer brings homemade food.

But tonight Riley in in New York finalizing a business deal, and Bozer is trying to pitch a film script to a studio. Jack knows Bozer’s worried about his job security.  _ Without someone to write PR releases FOR, he’s feeling the pressure.  _ Jack knows maybe he should be worried too, after all, he’s the bodyguard without anyone to look after. But for one thing, he knows Riley will fight tooth and nail to keep him and Boze around,  and for another, he can’t really bring himself to worry about anything but Mac.  _ Besides, if I failed him, I don’t deserve this job. _

He’s tired, but he can’t sleep, not until he turns on the TV for some background noise. Otherwise, he only dreams of the desert, and of Mac’s sad eyes as Jack turns and walks away from him while the kid bleeds out in the sand. As much as Jack knows that it’s not his fault they had to leave Mac behind, it doesn’t make the thought that he’s the next in a long line of people who’ve abandoned Mac hurt any less. 

He’s almost asleep when he hears Mac’s name, and he’s sitting bolt upright in seconds, cranking the volume as high as he can.

“After a month-long search, US troops are pulling out of the search for inventor and philanthropist Angus MacGyver. A statement issued today by Colonel John Hardy stated that no signs of life had been found, and the area has become too hostile to continue to justify sending troops on a fruitless search. Unfortunately, it seems that Mr. MacGyver’s friends and family will be forced to accept this as the only closure in a situation that we’ve been following for weeks.”

“They can’t do that.” Jack flings the remote down on his bed and grabs his phone. He flicks past the first number in his favorite contacts, his heart aching, and goes to the second.  _ This can’t be happening. It can’t be. They can’t give up on him like that. _

He’s woken Riley up, he forgot the time difference, but he doesn’t care. “Riley. Have you seen the news?”

She sounds so apologetic. “Jack, I know I should have called you, but the meeting took so long…” 

“They can’t just call off the search when they don’t know anything more than we did a month ago!” 

Riley sighs, her voice tired with more than just the sudden rude awakening. “Jack, they’ve done everything they can. There was no ransom demand, no trace of Mac being auctioned on the dark web. It think it’s time for us to accept that he’s gone. Maybe he was delirious and dragged himself away to die.” 

Jack can’t accept that. Can’t believe that his partner, like some wounded animal, would have crawled off into a hole in the ground and that’s  _ all. _

“I have to go back.”

“You can’t.” Riley sounds like she’s gotten up and is pacing the room. “Jack, you can barely walk across a room right now. You can’t go back to Afghanistan.” 

He knows she’s right, but he’s not going to take that excuse. “I get out of PT in two more weeks. And then no one can stop me.”

Riley sighs. “Okay, but you promise me you’ll give it the full two more weeks. And I’ll do what I can to make going back as easy as possible.” Jack knows she wants closure as much as he does. Well, almost as much.  _ That is my SON out there, and everyone else in the world may have given up on him, but I never will. _

He knows he can’t go back alone. Besides the fact that he will still be medically unable to do some things, he needs backup. But he knows people.

His old Delta team are almost all retired, except Worthy. But every single one of them would do or die for Jack. Within twenty-four hours of him getting out of the hospital, they’re meeting him on the tarmac. Ryan Thorpe looks actually tearful, it’s thanks to Mac’s work that the man is walking now. 

It pays to be the employee of a billion dollar company. There’s a jet fueled and waiting for them, and Worthy will be waiting in-country with three Blackhawk choppers. And they’re not leaving until they leave with Mac.

* * *

Mac feels a little better knowing there’s something he can be doing. Working on his projects has always been a good distraction, whether it’s from his dad walking out or from being held in a cave by a bunch of people who will definitely kill him when they find out he’s not going to give them what they want.

But the longer he can keep fooling them, the better. He just might be able to pull this off. He’s listing off everything he needs; these guys clearly won’t know the difference between him building his project or the Jericho.  _ If they knew how that missile was put together they wouldn’t have needed me. _

“Welding gear. I don’t care if it’s acetylene or propane. I need welding tools. I need helmets.” Pena translates for him, and the pile of gear in their little room just keeps growing. He’s carefully sorted everything, deciding what he can work on first, that will be least suspicious, and saving the parts that will clearly not look anything like a missile for last. 

Mac may not like weapons, but thanks to Jack, he knows more than he ever wanted to about them. And today, it’s going to come in handy. Because the first thing he has to do is fix the thing keeping him alive. Which means he needs a new power source for that electromagnet. 

He’s got a dozen small guided rockets in one pile, and he carefully removes the tiny fragment of metal he’s searching for and holds it up for Pena to see. “Palladium. .15 grams. I need at least 1.6. Let’s go break down the other eleven.” 

Getting the palladium out is the easy part. Getting it into the form he needs for what he’s making is harder. At home, he had a robotically controlled arm to assist with this. And while under normal conditions he might trust his hands, he’s developed what he’s pretty sure is pneumonia and a possible lung infection, and he shivers constantly. He won’t have the control to be able to do this. But he does have Pena.

When the palladium is melted, he talks Pena through what they need to do to cast the ring that will make the heart of the new power source. “You have to pour it directly into the mold we made. Don’t spill any over the edges. We only get one shot at this.”

“Relax. I have very steady hands. Why do you think you’re still alive?” Pena says, smiling. “I’ve been an EOD tech for fifteen years. If I didn’t have steady hands I’d be dead by now.” 

When the ring cools, Mac lifts it and gives it a cursory glance.  _ This will work. _ And now he can start putting everything together. 

This is what Mac knows. Whether it’s in the Tombs at MIT or a cold, filthy cave wherever this is, he is good at turning one thing into another. The tools aren’t the top of the line equipment he has back home, but that doesn’t matter. He’s always been good at improvising. 

When the little glowing blue circle is complete, Mac raises it and gives it a glance. He’s pretty sure it’s sized perfectly to fit in the cylinder in his chest. 

“That doesn’t look like a missile.” Pena raises an eyebrow. 

“It’s a miniaturized arc reactor. A full size version powers my factory at home.” His senior project at MIT. Mac’s pretty proud of that breakthrough if he does say so himself.  _ Cutting edge clean energy technology. _ He technically has a patent on it, but there have been at least three replications of it, and he’s only sued once, and that time because the modifications the company had made were making the reactor dangerous.  _ I don’t care if people borrow my designs and improve them. There’s always someone smarter.  _ Even if Jack would disagree. 

Pena’s clearly impressed. “How much does it generate?”

Mac sets the device down. “If my math is right, and it always is, three gigajoules per second.”

Pena looks slightly confused, but he’s caught on to the concept. “That’s a lot more power than that magnet needs.”

“Oh, I know. This isn’t for the magnet.” Mac grins. “It’s for this.” He spreads out the papers. “Our ticket out of here.”  _ Jack, you would have either loved this...or decided I was going to start the apocalypse.  _

* * *

“What’s your story?” Mac asks. It’s late, he and Pena are both exhausted, and he feels like he’s accomplished something, because thanks to Pena’s careful hands, the arc reactor is now settled and glowing in Mac’s chest. It gives off a bit of warmth, not much with its efficiency, but something, and Mac will take anything he can get in here. “How’d you end up here?”

“I was on a bomb disposal call, with a trainee. The whole thing was a trap. There was a second bomb, and my trainee was killed. When I woke up, I was here. I suppose they wanted to use me for something.” He glances at Mac. “I told them I would never help them make bombs. But they didn’t kill me. They asked me to act as a medic. That I could do.”

Mac nods. He can understand that. He wouldn’t want anyone to die, enemy or not. 

“I have a wife and daughter, back home,” Pena says quietly. “I’m sure they wonder, every night, if I’m dead. What happened.”

“Well, when I get you out of here, you can tell them yourself.” Mac smiles a little.

“So what about you, MacGyver? Any family?”

“Well, a couple people who are like siblings to me. And…” Thinking of Jack is a worse pain in his chest than the electromagnet. He suddenly doesn’t want to talk anymore, and he goes to his bunk, rolling himself up in the thin, filthy blanket there and falling asleep to the rhythmic hum of the reactor in his chest.

He doesn’t bring up family with Pena again, and the next week or two feel like they fly past. He’s making every component he needs separately, so that it doesn’t look like anything at the moment. He’s not getting too detailed, they need brute force, not finesse, for this one. 

But he can’t assemble everything fast enough to make an escape viable. And despite the fact that he tries to hide any of the pieces that might be clearly not missile-shaped, somehow word still must get back to his captors that something is wrong. He knows, thanks to Pena, that there are cameras in the cave. He must not have been careful enough, because not long after he finished the faceplate of the armor, someone is pounding on the door and shouting.

It swings open, and by now Mac is used to the routine of putting his hands on his head. It doesn’t hurt so much to do it now, his body is getting used to the presence of the metal in his chest. 

But Mac is surprised at who steps into the room. This is someone new. The man stalks forward, an eerie determination in his eyes, then reaches up and unzips Mac’s jacket. He shivers.  _ All this time, I thought I was going to at least be safe from something like this. _ But maybe they’ve decided it’s a good way to persuade him to work on what they want. 

“Relax.” Mac blinks in surprise at the fact that he’s speaking English. It seems strange now to hear that from anyone but Pena. The man studies the arc reactor in Mac’s chest.  _ This wasn’t about what I was building now... _ Mac tried to hide the arc reactor under the heavy jacket he was given. But working with the forge to make the larger armor plating meant wearing anything more than the thin t-shirt underneath it would make him overheat. They must have seen the arc reactor glowing through it. 

And then the man turns around, spreading his arms. “The bow and arrow. Once the pinnacle of weapons technology. It allowed the great Genghis Khan to rule from the Pacific to the Ukraine. Twice the size of the kingdom of Alexander the Great. Four times the size of the Roman Empire.” He turns back to them. “But today, whoever holds the most advanced weapons rules these lands. And soon, that will be me.” He stalks back to Mac. “Unless  _ you _ continue to stall.” And then he turns to two of his men, yells something, and they rush forward to grab Pena and pull him away. All of them are talking over each other, too fast for Mac to understand

And then the man forces Pena to his knees, and pulls a hot coal from the furnace. 

“What do you want?” Mac yells, terrified.  _ Please, don’t hurt him. _ Mac feels sick.  _ They won’t damage me unless they need to, I’m too valuable. But to them, Pena isn’t. _

“The missile I asked for.” The man pauses, holding the coal in the air. Mac watches it hiss and smoke. 

“Why do you want, a delivery date?” Mac snaps. “I’m doing the best I can. This isn’t exactly a state of the art manufacturing plant.” He gestures vaguely at the stone walls and poor lighting. 

“You built that.” The man waves the tongs toward the arc reactor.

“Yeah, it’s a lot smaller!” Mac shrugs. “A missile has a lot more components. You don’t want me to do it wrong. It’ll blow up in your face.” The man seems to consider that for a moment. “And if you want it done fast, I need him. It’s hard to find good assistants.”

The man throws down the tongs and nods to his men, who release Pena. “You have till tomorrow. To assemble my missile.”

The door slams and Mac turns to Pena. “Let’s get to work.” 

This isn’t his first all-nighter. Not even close. He’s had harder deadlines at MIT. Or at least that’s what he tells himself when he starts putting the finishing touches on the machine that is either going to get him and Pena to freedom, or get them killed. 

He leaves some of the assembly to Pena’s deft hands while he works on getting suited up. Now the protective welding gear is going to make sure this thing doesn’t set him on fire. He hopes. His hands and arms are going to be covered with the leather gloves he uses with a torch, and his neck is protected by a piece of leather repurposed from part of an old welding hood. 

He rattles off the directions Pena’s given him, the way out of the cave. He has to remember. They only get one shot at this. He winces when each piece of the assembly is bolted on. It’s painfully tight against his legs and arms, but the worst pressure is on his chest. He thought the ache was going away. It’s not. 

They’re almost done when Mac hears yelling at the door.  _ Too soon. It’s too soon. We’re not ready.  _ “Pena, tell him to give us ten more minutes.” 

“He’s speaking Hungarian. I don’t speak Hungarian.” Pena yells something, and then the man shoves the door open. The propane tanks rigged to it explode, and Mac hears the door fly and hit something. He winces.  _ I didn’t want anyone to get hurt, not even these guys. But we have to do something. And if we don’t stop them, they’ll kill thousands with the weapons they do have.  _ Sometimes Mac hates the real world. 

“Did that work?” He asks, afraid to look. 

“Definitely.” Pena glances back at him. “But we have to move fast. What did you say to do with the computers?”

Mac tries to remember how Riley did these things; computers aren’t really Mac’s forte.  _ When other kids were playing video games on their first laptop, I was taking mine apart to figure out how it worked. Never really did.. _ . “Press function 11. Tell me when you see a progress bar. There should be one.”

“I have it.”

“Press Control I. Control I and Enter. Then come help me finish this.” He’s so scared they won’t be done in time. That they’re both going to get caught, and they’ll kill Pena for helping him.  _ It doesn’t matter what happens to me. But I won’t let him die.  _

And then his worst fear becomes a reality when he hears shouting in the hallway outside. Pena looks up at him, with a glance that seems almost sad, but also kindly, and reminds him of Jack. And then the man tightens the final bolt and runs for the door. Mac hears a machine gun click and start firing, and he  _ knows _ what’s happening. “That’s not the plan! Pena!” Mac shouts after the man. 

And then the computers engage, the room goes dark, and Mac feels the harness fall away. There’s a final low beep, and then he stumbles forward, hydraulics engaging, systems coming online. It’s clumsy, but it  _ works. _ Mac, despite the situation, feels a small smile creeping across his face.  _ Of course it works. This is what I’m good at. _

And then there’s more shouts, and Mac hears bullets ping off random things in the room.  _ If they shoot the wrong thing in here, it all blows. _ He has to get out. 

Mac flinches at every gunshot, even though he knows they can’t hurt him. This suit is heavy, and hot, and it’s like learning to walk all over again.  _ Please don’t let me fall. _ Riley jokes that he can trip over thin air. He hopes that clumsiness stays away at least until he gets out of here. He stumbles to the door, swinging his arms wildly to knock anyone around him off balance. He swings too hard once, and gets his arm stuck in the crumbling stone. By the time he wrenches it free, there’s at least a dozen men closing in.

_ Okay, time to get busy.  _ He’s pretty proud of the flamethrowers he built into the suit, they’re definitely an improvement over the one he built when he was seven that he accidentally torched the backyard shed with. 

It only takes a few bursts of flame to get these guys to back off, and then he’s moving again. He can see light now, he’s almost out…

And then he hears it. It feels louder than the shouting, than the clanging of his own suit. Someone is wounded, gasping for breath. Mac crashes to his knees beside a heap of ammunition crates. Pena is leaning against them, his gun hanging from limp hands, his chest torn wide open from bullets. “Pena. No, no, no.” 

Mac blinks back the tears burning his eyes. He didn’t want to kill anyone; he’d resigned himself to dying here in this cave. Saving himself wasn’t the plan. What he did, he did to reunite this man with his family. Now that Pena’s gone, was it all for nothing? 

“It’s...alright...I’m a soldier. I chose...this life. I only wish…” his breath gurgles, “that I...could see...my wife and daughter again.” Pena slips his dogtags off his neck with shaking hands and holds them up. “Don’t...waste your life...MacGyver.” 

“I’ll take care of your family. I promise.” He slips the dogtags around his own neck and closes the visor of the suit again as the man’s eyes slip closed forever.  _ I’ll let them know that Alfred Pena died a hero. _

There’s a rattle of shots against the suit, and Mac turns, a blind rage filling him at the sight of the man who very well might be responsible for killing his friend. He stands up, swinging his arm wildly and sending the man crashing into another pile of crates, before stumbling out the entrance of the cave. 

This is what he really created the flamethrowers for. Mac walks slowly into the valley, ignoring the hail of gunfire, sweeping the fire up and over each of the weapons crates. He hears shells exploding, and he knows in a few minutes the larger artillery is going to catch. 

And then something goes off next to him, knocking him onto his side. There’s nothing but fire and pain. Mac sinks to his knees, gasping for breath. The heat is making breathing almost impossible, and Mac can feel the ache in his lungs growing. He struggles to his knees, then to his feet. He doesn’t know if this is going to work, but it’s the only chance he has of getting out. He flips the switch that diverts all power to the thrusters at his feet, and then he’s airborne, just as the valley explodes behind him. 

Unfortunately, he didn’t have enough time to work out the whole flying thing. He honestly didn’t even expect to get this far. But now, he’s kind of wishing he put a little more thought into that part as he plummets toward the sand, in a suit that’s totally lost function. 

_ I officially hate this.  _ Why he made a suit that can fly he doesn’t know.  _ It seemed like a good idea at the time. _ But being this far above the ground, unable to control anything, and freefalling fast, is terrifying. If he survives this, he’s going to have nightmares for months. 

And then he hits the sand.

* * *

When Mac comes to, he wishes he hadn’t. There’s sand everywhere, he feels like he’s broiling alive in the metal suit, and everything hurts. He manages, somehow, to kick off most of the pieces of the suit, they were breaking apart anyway, and then stacks enough of it into a crude shelter and hunkers down. He doesn’t want to stay here, but he’s scared to try and walk away, especially in the middle of the day.

It’s so hot. He’s so thirsty. The sun is scorching, and he has no idea where he really is. He could be a mile from the nearest village and miss it completely if he’s walking the wrong way. 

He keeps waiting as his shadow shifts from one side to the other, and lengthens. When night comes, he’ll try to make it somewhere. If he can hold out. His fever is back, he thinks, and he’s been coughing up awful-looking gunk since the crash landing, which must have jarred something loose. The sand rubbed into the raw burns from where his suit was pressed against his skin and got overheated in the explosion, and he thinks he has a dislocated shoulder.  _ I’m in no condition to do anything at all.  _

Something begins to rumble, and Mac glances up, blinking at the painfully bright sky. There are three black specks coming closer. He scrambles out and begins to wave frantically, but they’re flying over and past. And no matter why they’re here, they won’t be coming back. 

He sinks to his knees in the sand. He’s going to die here. He’d cry if he had any water in his body left to spare. 

And then there’s a yell, a voice that he thinks he knows.  _ But that’s impossible. _

He knows he’s pretty far gone if he’s seeing things. Because that looks like a military helicopter landing. And it almost looks like Jack jumping out.  _ It can’t be a mirage, because a mirage needs the actual thing to be somewhere to reflect.  _ He’s hallucinating now, and that means he’s got heatstroke, more than likely.  

_ I’m definitely hallucinating.  _ Because that’s clearly  _ Jack _ running toward him. And Jack is dead.  _ And it’s my fault.  _

Maybe this is one of those things where people are visited by the spirits of the dead who went before them, to bring them over to the ‘other side’. Jack’s probably going to be angry with him for dragging them both into that war zone. It was Mac’s choice to go. He wants Jack to comfort him, but he doesn’t deserve it. What he deserves is to die out here too, alone and in pain. 

“Mac! Mac!” Mac’s heard plenty of stories of dying people who see family members who already died...Jack is one of the closest things to family he has...had left.  _ Maybe he still cares? Maybe he doesn’t hate me? _

“Jack…” His voice trails off, choked out in his dry throat.

“Oh my God. It’s okay, kid, it’s okay. I’ve got you.” The older man collapses to his knees, throwing his arms around Mac. Real, solid, arms. Not a hallucination.  _ Jack is alive. I don’t know how, but Jack is alive. _

Mac leans into his shoulder, and if Jack feels the tears staining his uniform he doesn’t say anything. “Hey Carl’s Jr.” It sounds like Jack might be crying too. “I got you. I got you.”

“You’re alive,” Mac chokes out. “You’re real.”

“Yeah I am, kid. I’m right here. It’s gonna be okay, Mac. It’s over. We’re taking you home.” 


	3. Chapter 3

When Riley gets the call from Jack, she doesn’t even balk at the fact that it’s four am and she’s barely been asleep since two. She’s out of bed and calling Bozer and on her way to the airport all before four-thirty.

She honestly didn’t think this was going to happen. She knows Jack was holding out all the hope in the world, but Jack is always a dreamer, a believer in the impossible. She’s seen him sneaking Mac’s copies of Scientific American whenever there’s an article on Frankie Mallory, the woman who’s on replicating the old Captain America super soldier serum with gamma radiation, or the astrophysicist Jill Morgan and her insistence that there are such things as Einstein Rosen bridges that make portals to other worlds. If it sounds impossible, Jack is fascinated with it.

Riley wants to say she had the same conviction Jack did that Mac was going to come home alive. But she knows, standing there on the runway and watching the jet taxi in, that she didn’t. _By all logic, he should have been dead._ When the ramp goes down and she sees Mac, one arm around Jack’s shoulders, fighting to stay on his feet but smiling when he sees her and Boze and Walsh standing there waiting.

Mac, predictably, refuses the stretcher and the paramedics’ assistance, even though it looks like he can barely walk. He’s coughing, eyes bright with fever, and Riley cringes at the stick thin arms visible under the rolled sleeves of Jack’s extra uniform. Mac’s never been bulky at the best of times, but the amount of weight he’s lost is scary.

The second Jack gets him into the car, Riley taps the driver’s shoulder. “Take us to the hospital.”

Mac clears his throat and whispers,“No.”

Riley groans. “Mac, you have to go the hospital.”

“No. I’ve been in captivity for three months. I want to go home.” She can’t refuse the look in his eyes. _Okay._

She doesn’t back down on the fact that Mac needs medical attention. She calls a doctor she knows will be willing to work in Mac’s house, without transferring him to another facility. Carlos Rivera is former military, too, so he’s more careful about approaching Mac when he’s feverish, and gentle with anything he needs to do to avoid sparking a reaction to trauma. Riley knows Mac is in capable hands.

There’s plenty wrong, she can see it in Carlos’s eyes when he walks out of the bedroom they’ve basically turned into an ICU. Jack refused to leave the whole time, and he’s still holding Mac’s hand, even though Mac passed out a good hour ago, exhausted.

“He’s suffering from the effects of long term malnutrition, dehydration, and a severe untreated lung infection and pneumonia. Frankly, the fact that he’s still alive is a miracle.” Carlos sighs. “I’m going to keep an eye on him through the night, make sure his condition doesn’t deteriorate.” Riley nods. She glances into the room, past Carlos. Mac looks so small, so weak, laying there on the bed in with all the wires and the tubes pumping his body full of liquids and antibiotics and draining away the fluid from his lungs.

It’s two weeks before Mac is allowed to even think about leaving his bed. Riley knows he’s tired of them all fussing over him, of Walsh catching him up on what he’s missed and trying to pretend it’s business as usual, of Jack trying to apologize, of Riley hovering, of Bozer trying to feed him. He looks haunted, frightened, lost. And it breaks Riley’s heart to see someone she thinks of as a little brother brought to this.

Mac flinches at sudden movements, and he has nightmares that leave him wrung out exhausted and crying. He yells for Jack in his sleep, and sometimes he yells for someone named Pena. Thanks to the dog tags Jack says he could barely pry out of Mac’s hand when he found him, Riley’s learned that the person Mac is trying to talk to is one Alfred Pena, an EOD tech who went missing, presumed KIA, in Afghanistan three years ago.

Riley’s spent her whole time at the house, doing whatever office work she needs to remotely. She won’t admit to even to herself, but she feels guilty for acting like she might have given up on Mac. For not believing he was going to come home. _If not for Jack, he would have been left out there to die._

She thought she was doing a good job hiding her guilt, but clearly Mac’s picked up on it. Because when she sits down next to his bed, cringing at the sight of the bandages across his chest that can’t totally hide the glow of the arc reactor he’s had to build to save his life, he reaches out for her hand and holds it tightly. His fingers are rougher than ever, stained dark, scarred, and the nails broken. Riley doesn’t know why she fixates on the small things. _Just more reminders that his whole life was one endless round of horrors. For three months._

“Riley,” he whispers. “Stop blaming yourself. None of this was your fault. Just like it wasn’t Jack’s.”

“Yeah, like either of us are going to believe that. It wasn’t your fault, that’s for sure.” She rubs her thumb over his hand.

“It wasn’t anyone’s fault but the people who wanted me to help them kill.” Mac sighs, his breathing is still weak and trying to talk for any length of time exhausts him. “I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“But somehow, they knew. Mac, someone knew you were going to be there. What if I made a mistake? What if someone hacked our records and I missed it?” She’s been living with that thought for months, even though she’s run every diagnostic she can and come up clean.

“We had to...report to the State Department. They could have let something slip. Anyone could have been watching us after we landed, too.” Mac leans back against the pillow. “This wasn’t on you. And it’s over, now.”

Riley nods. “Is there anything I can do?”

“Keep things running...until I can come back.” She nods. If that’s what he wants, that’s exactly what she’s going to do.

For the first time, walking into Mac’s office doesn’t feel like a betrayal. _Now we’re not running the company without him, we’re just keeping it going until he’s ready to come back._

She looks stronger than she feels, all business in her crisp suit and carefully straightened hair. There’s a decent lineup of people waiting, at least half of them clearly press. Riley directs them to Bozer’s office, he’s the one who’s good with words. Thanks to him, no one knows just how touch and go Mac’s condition was.

With the reporters gone, Riley’s fairly sure all she still has to deal with are the two executives trying to push corporate mergers, and the people from the New York offices. But there’s one person she doesn’t recognize, not even from the dossiers that popped up on her phone when she entered the building for the day. Whoever this woman is, she didn’t clear herself with the usual channels. It’s like she appeared out of nowhere. But she’s intimidated two national executives into letting her into the office first.

“Miss Davis.” The woman may be small, but her voice is commanding. “I need to speak with you. I’m Agent Matilda Webber of the Proactive Homeland Operations, Enforcement, and Incident Expediting Agency.”

“That’s a mouthful,” Riley mutters.

“Yes, we’re working on an acronym.” The woman sounds like she’s heard the same thing a hundred times.

“You know, we’ve been approached already by the DOD, the CIA, the FBI…”

“We’re a separate division.” Agent Webber doesn’t seem like she’s going to be deterred. “We need to debrief Mr. MacGyver about the circumstances of his escape.”

“Well, let me put you on the books, okay? I’ll talk to Mac and figure out a time.” Riley doesn’t really have time to deal with another government suit. And she knows Mac doesn’t want to talk to anyone. He’s been through enough. Jack says the PTSD is as bad as he’s ever seen, and he’s seen guys come home from combat. Mac doesn’t say much about what happened in those three months, but Riley can imagine. And she doesn’t want him to have to think about it anymore.

When Webber walks out, Riley has the oddest feeling. The feeling that something just changed. And she can’t tell if that’s good or bad.

* * *

The radio is still set to Jack’s favorite classic rock station, and Mac finally feels home. He hasn’t been sleeping well, but going down to the lab and working helps him forget the darkness and pain and fear. He’s finally managed to convince Carlos that the best thing for his recovery is for him to be up and moving around, and to be doing something he enjoys. Or that at least distracts him.

He’s been working on an improved version of the arc reactor in his chest. The one he has is a temporary stopgap for the situation, but he knows he can make a more efficient one.

Jack is, as usual, hovering. “Whatcha doin’, Mac?”

“Soldering the housing to keep the palladium from contaminating my bloodstream. These things really aren’t made to be inserted into the human body, so I have to do some modifications. It decreases efficiency by 14 percent, but it reduces radiation emissions by 82 percent, so it’s a good tradeoff.”

“Radiation? Whoa, wait, are we gonna start glowing?” Jack takes a few steps back.

“No, Palladium is one of the less...potent elements.” Mac grins. “A few hours’ exposure won’t do permanent damage.”

“And you’ve had that thing in your chest how long?” Jack asks pointedly.

“Inside a metal housing. I created a lead sleeve lining that should have contained most of it.” Mac glances at Jack. “It was that or let a dozen shrapnel fragments crawl into my heart and stab me to death.” He feels oddly detached from the whole thing, like this is someone else’s body he’s talking about. Like he doesn’t feel the shards each time he raises an arm, each time he bends over. The magnet is holding them in place, but aside from risky, invasive surgery, he’s going to live with them for the rest of his life.

He looks up at Jack again. “Listen, if you’re that worried about radiation, why don’t you go upstairs and help Boze make dinner? I could kill for some of your chili.” He’s not actually too hungry, but it will give Jack something to do, and honestly, the chili does sound pretty good. He’s trying to force himself to eat; he knows he has to, but some part of him just can’t accept that he actually has enough food now. _Who would have thought three months was enough time to totally reshape the way your world works?_ It’s not that he hasn’t lived in marginalized, food-scarce communities for that amount of time, but this is the longest it’s ever taken him to readjust.

He finishes assembling the reactor, and then sets it down on the workbench. He has to swap them out, but he knows he’s not going to be able to do it on himself. And neither Jack or Bozer will be able to reach down into that metal sleeve to detach the connections, Mac’s own hand will barely fit. But he thinks he knows someone who might be able to help. He pulls his phone out of his pocket and dials.

“Riley? How big are your hands?”

He can _hear_ the confused frown in her voice. “What?”

“I need a favor.”

When Riley comes down the stairs, she glances around until she sees Mac sitting in the chair by his workbench, shirt unbuttoned so they can get to the arc reactor. “Mac, what’s going on?”

He taps the arc reactor in his chest. “I’ve got a new version of this now, it’s just a replacement. But I can’t do it myself. Last time…” He trails off. _Last time, Pena did this._ The EOD tech with his steady hands and calmness. _He’s the only reason I’m still alive._  

“There’s an exposed wire under the device that’s contacting the socket wall and shorting out.” Mac nods downward. “I just need you to reach in there and disconnect this from the baseplate, and then attach the new one, okay?”

Riley just stares. “Mac, I’m not qualified for this. I’m a tech developer and a hacker. Not a doctor.”

“You are the most capable, qualified person I know.” Mac grins. “It’s just like playing Operation.”

“ _Mac!_ You know I suck at that game! Every game night!”

“I know.” He chuckles. “You can do this.”

Riley reaches inside the metal sleeve, making a disgusted face. “There’s pus…”

“It’s a plasmic discharge. From the device, not my body.” Mac grins.

“It smells…”

“I know. Okay, you’ve got the baseplate now. Just don’t pull out…” Mac groans when he feels the clunk. “Uh, the magnet on the end.” He sighs. There’s a loud, annoying beeping now. _Wonderful._

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing...just that I’m gonna start going into cardiac arrest because that…”

Riley cuts off his random stream of scientific jabber. She takes a deep breath and puts a hand on Mac’s shoulder. “Mac, it’s gonna be okay. I’m gonna make it okay.” He nods.

“I know you will.”

Riley grabs the new arc reactor, reaching back into the chest sleeve to attach it to the baseplate. “Do I have to put the magnet back?”

“Nope, that was part of the old one, the one with the battery.” Mac just didn’t particularly want to pull it out in case he needed to go old school for some reason. But if he does, he’ll just whip something up. “Just attach that where the old one was.” Riley does, and then grabs a handful of blue work towels from the table and wipes her hands, shuddering.

“Don’t you ever, ever ask me to do that again.” Riley says, starting to laugh and collapsing into another one of the chairs.

“Well, Jack and Bozer’s hands were too big.” Mac continues to chuckle until Jack yells down the stairs that food is ready if the kids are ready to stop playing around in the basement.

“What do you want me to do with this?” Riley holds up the old arc reactor; she hasn’t let go of it yet.

Mac almost tells her to take it to tech storage at the labs. _It still runs really well, even with it being so makeshift._ But then he thinks about what will happen if someone finds out about everything. _They’ll wonder why I built it in the first place._ And the more people who know the truth, the more chance something will slip. He doesn’t need the fact that he’s literally being kept alive by an electromagnet making its way to the general public.

But as much as Mac wants to put everything from those horrible months into a box and shove it somewhere dark and hidden forever, he can’t seem to get that robotic suit out of his head.

He’s designed prosthetic limbs for years, ever since meeting one of Jack’s old war buddies who lost his leg. And really, this is just a more advanced version. _I wonder whether it would be a viable solution for paralyzed limbs that are still attached to the body._

Mac learned a long time ago not to ignore the beginnings of ideas. He taps the inset tablet in the worktable, and S.P.A.R.K.I. comes online with a soft hum and a holographic glow of a keypad. Mac opts to use the voice commands instead. “Open a new project file. Mark II.”

“Do you want to store this on the company database?”

“No, I don’t know who to trust right now.”

“Working on a secret project, are we?” S.P.A.R.K.I. asks. Mac doesn’t know. _There’s no reason to keep development of a new medical technology under wraps_.

He knows one of the symptoms of PTSD is paranoia. Maybe that’s all this is. But for some reason, he can’t shake the feeling that something is wrong. That someone he trusts isn’t worth that confidence. _It can’t be Jack. Or Riley, or Bozer, or Walsh._ His family wouldn’t turn on him. Would they?

 _Definitely paranoia._ He guesses he should bring that up when the therapist comes this week. She’s been nice about the whole thing; Jack recommended her personally. Desiree Nguyen is a combat vet herself, who went back to school after her tour to become a counselor. Desi isn’t the kind of touchy-feely person Mac has always associated with psychology professionals. She’s brutally honest about things, which makes Mac feel like he can be honest with her. She knows more than even Jack about what happened to Mac in Afghanistan. _If I told Jack, he’d just beat himself up with guilt more than he already does._ Desi just listens and nods and best of all, doesn’t seem to pity him, at least not visibly. She just wants the same thing he does, for him to be able to move on with his life.

He’s starting to think the best way to move on is to turn the horror of the past into something useful. To make it worth something. He pulls out a small stylus and begins sketching on the table surface. _The first design was rough, I had limited materials. Now, I can do anything I want._ And then Jack yells at him that food’s been ready for ten minutes and everyone is going to eat without him. He laughs and begins to limp up the stairs, shaking his head. Maybe normal is going to come back, a little at a time.

* * *

Bozer holds up the camera. “Smile, you’re on Candid Camera!” He says, and Mac chuckles. Bozer’s never gotten over his love of filmmaking, even if he’s just shooting lab tests with his phone.

“Testing…Day 1, test 1.” Mac shifts his weight. “I’ve cleared a work area, Dummy is standing by for fire safety.” He let Jack pick his robot’s name, and it always makes him smile.

Mac gestures to the small glowing spots on the gloves pulled over his hands. “These are motion stabilizers. They’ll emit an energy pulse when a change of balance is indicated, and they’ll keep the wearer upright.” Mac figures that if this goes into production as an actual new type of orthotic, people who’ve never walked in their lives might finally have the chance to.

Riley’s designing a program that will make the robotic legs and arms mimic natural movement, but a little extra balance probably wouldn’t hurt. And, especially for kids, these stabilisers are way cooler than a cane. Mac can’t help but grin at the thought of some five or ten or fifteen year old walking for the first time on their own. _If what I went through makes that possible, it will all have been worth it._

“We’re going to start off nice and easy, ten percent thrust capacity.” He hopes it’s enough to keep himself from falling on his face when he pretends to trip on something. _If not, it’s just going to be another thing for Bozer to laugh at me about._

He takes a few steps and then jolts forward, hands spread out in the natural human reaction to falling. And then he’s not falling...he’s flying.

He has just enough time to realize his energy output calculations must have been wrong before he’s slammed against the ceiling, and then crashes down on a tool chest. _Ouch._ He’s pretty sure he just gave himself a mild concussion and a couple cracked ribs. He can hear Bozer rushing over. “Mac! Are you okay? What happened?”

He sighs when Dummy engages the fire extinguisher. _It knows me too well._ Mac _has_ set himself on fire more than once. Although more often in the kitchen than the lab.

“Do me a favor and don’t ever show Jack that one.” Mac groans as he starts pushing himself to his feet. _Time to go back to the drawing board._

* * *

“Day 11, test 37, configuration 2.0.” Which is a fancy way of saying Mac’s moved everything he could ram himself into. He’s recalibrated his calculations to factor in the proximity of the arc reactor to the powered stabilizers, and now he’s fairly sure he’s got the problem worked out.

“For lack of a better option Dummy is still on fire safety.”

Bozer chuckles.

“We’re gonna start on _one_ percent thrust capacity.” Mac really hopes he doesn’t crash this time, because Jack is watching. _He’ll tell me to stop working on this. And right now, it’s the only thing keeping me sane._ “Okay, here goes nothing…” He takes a step and pretends to trip, again, flinching when he holds his hands out. It’s probably his imagination, but his back still aches from slamming into that girder.

This time, there’s just a gentle hovering, and Mac’s leaning above the floor.

“Increase to two percent.” The stabilizers begin gently pushing him upright, until he’s back on his feet. Jack laughs.

“Kid, you shoulda made this years ago. Woulda saved you at least a couple o’ nasty falls.” Mac shakes his head. _I know I’m clumsy. No need to rub it in._

He’s happy with the stabilizers. And Riley’s programming is almost complete. Now he just has to design the prototype.

He should probably be sleeping, it’s past midnight and he’s still in the lab. But he wants everything about this prototype to be correct.

“Use a gold-titanium alloy. It should improve structural integrity.” He glances at the fabrication rendering. _That’s a little bright._ He sees Jack’s car out of the corner of his eye, and he smirks. _If we’re going to be visible, let’s make it worth it._ “Hey, throw a little hot rod red in there.” He thinks Jack might be rubbing off on him. _Red and gold, that’s a little flashy. But I like it._

 


	4. Chapter 4

Looking at computer renderings definitely didn’t prepare Mac for what the final product would look like. Full size, solid, and right there in front of him, it’s...actually a little intimidating. _Of course, there would only be a few times we’d opt for a full suit in medical applications. But the more I’ve looked into it, this could protect firefighters, EOD techs like Pena..._ it’s like body armor that’s actually responsive to the wearer. Jack complains about his kevlar often enough. _And I saw a lot of the soldiers who came to get me in Afghanistan coming close to overheating in their gear._ This suit is protective, has assisted movement, and with the internal climate controls, it would have a massive advantage over other protective gear.

Mac blinks, because instead of the Mark II, he’s seeing the suit he’s retroactively labeled Mark I. He stumbles backward, catching the edge of a table to hold himself up. _I’m safe. I’m not in that cave. I’m home. It’s over._

He should walk away. But he has something to prove to himself. He needs to remind himself that things are different now. He has to put on the suit.

Mac shudders as he steps onto the staging area he’s designed. _I should call Jack down._ But it’s three a.m. and if Jack gets one glimpse of this he’s going to drag Mac away and tell him this is the wrong way to go about it. _But I have to._

He has to keep taking deep breaths as the robotic arms assemble the suit around him. _The last time, it was Pena helping me._ He swallows back a wave of grief at the memory of the man with his chest torn apart, gasping out his last breaths in that cold, dark cave. Begging Mac not to waste his life. _I’m going to do this so people like Pena, so people like the tech he was working with, are safer doing their jobs._

And then the suit clicks into place and the world goes dark around him. Mac can feel his breathing speeding up, and he clenches and unclenches his fists, taking slow, steady breaths the way Desi’s been making him practice in their sessions. “Engage heads up display.”

“We are online and ready.” S.P.A.R.K.I.’s voice is calming, it’s strange to hear it right there in his ear. This suit feels nothing like the last one. It’s not clunky, it’s trim and fitted to his body. He doesn’t feel like he’s going to knock something over every time he moves.

“Do a check on control surfaces.” Mac can barely feel the movement, he’s been careful to prevent the metal exterior from contacting the interior lining. Not only does the lining keep the metal away from his skin, it also contains the smart sensors that monitor his heart rate and breathing, and the heating and oxygen systems. _And it’s a watertight seal when the faceplate is down._ Mac’s had a fear of drowning since that cave.

His vitals are evening out, although his heart rate is still elevated. But that’s beginning to feel more like excitement than fear. No matter what, this is still a new invention, and it _works._ Mac is still Mac. He still loves making something and watching it come together the way he could see it in his head. _They didn’t take away the most important things about me._

He leans forward, and the stabilizers kick in. This time, he has them cranked to two and a half percent, and they actually lift him off the floor a little. _Whoa. Okay, cool..._

 _I should probably see if we’re going to need to put a power governor on those stabilizers, or build in some kind of preventative failsafe_ . Well, that’s what he’s telling himself. The reality is, he’s curious. And S.P.A.R.K.I. won’t let him fall. He hopes. He still wakes up gasping from nightmares of falling in the desert; aside from watching Pena die in front of him, that’s the thing that haunts him the most. “Let’s test this.” _I just have to do it, and not fall this time. And maybe I’ll be able to get past that fear._

If Jack sees him, he’ll definitely say no. _But I’ve spent the entire time since I came home cooped up in this house._ Mac angles himself so he’s looking out the opening of the garage, leans slightly forward, and kicks the stabilizers up to five percent.

It’s definitely not a smooth ride. He careens off the walls twice on his way up from the underground room, and he has to keep his hands at his sides and even for propulsion. _If I really wanted to fly, I’d have to build these into the feet as well._ But it works. And when he emerges from the garage into the starlit night, he feels like something heavy just slid off his shoulders.

He spirals upward, straight up. _Wow._ “How are we holding up, S.P.A.R.K.I.?”

“Considering this suit was not designed for sustained flight, quite well.” The robotic voice has plenty of Riley’s sarcasm. _Guess that’s what happens when you let someone with plenty of sass and not a lot of room to use it in her day job program AIs._

But he can’t just keep going up forever. He starts to angle for descent, and he moves one arm just a little too much. And now he’s spiraling _down,_ way too fast. This is like his nightmare all over again. He knows what he has to do to snap out of this, but he can’t make himself move. All he can see underneath him is sand...

 _Oh no._ He’s losing control. Of the suit and of his mind. _Come on, MacGyver, get it together._ He takes a shuddery breath and forces his arms to move, catching himself into an upward arc just as he nearly crashlands in the middle of a street. He can hear angry horns honking behind him. He almost hit a car. _Okay, flying...not a good idea._ _I need to go home now._

He doesn’t think, as shaken as he is, that he’s going to be able to go down as close to the ground as he’ll have to to go back in the garage. He’s swaying aimlessly, trying to put down in the yard, but it seems like he always ends up back over the roof. _Okay, I guess that’s as good as we’re going to get._ He’s edging closer and closer to a full-blown panic attack, he just needs to be on the ground, _now._

“Cut power.”

Two seconds, one roof, and the hood of Jack’s car later, he realizes that was a big, big mistake.

Dummy is overzealously spraying him with a fire extinguisher when he hears Jack’s voice from the stairs. “Mac? You okay?” He just leans his head back with a sigh. _Caught sneaking out._

* * *

Mac stumbles up the stairs, holding an ice pack to his head. “I won’t do it again. I promise.”

“Was it fun, at least?” Jack sounds intrigued, still pissed, but intrigued nonetheless. “I’ve always wonder what it would be like if I could fly like that.”

“It was actually kind of scary.” Mac doesn’t feel any better about heights than he did earlier this evening.

“You better hope that goose egg goes away by tomorrow night,” Jack says, sitting down on the couch next to him.

“What’s tomorrow night?” Mac asks blearily. His head hurts too much to remember, and he hasn’t looked at his calendar in weeks, the thought of getting out there in front of people stresses him out.

“The veterans’ benefit?” Jack asks, putting an arm around Mac’s shoulder. _Right. Tomorrow’s the anniversary of Jack saving my life in Bangladesh._ Mac’s wanted to pay that forward in more ways than just hiring Jack. So every year, he’s held a fundraiser for combat wounded veterans. “I thought you should go to that. If anyone gets what you’ve been through, it’s those guys. They’ll understand, and you might be able to talk to them.” Mac nods. He’s well aware that he’s got PTSD just like them. _And they’re courageous enough to go out and function every day, with that in their lives. And I’m just hiding here._ He knows that’s not totally true, that everyone processes in their own way, but still, he really wants to go. Because Jack will go with him, and that’s going to make it better. _I just want to do something that still feels normal._

* * *

Mac parks his Jeep and smoothes out his suit. _I hate public events. But I need to see what’s going on._

“Let’s just go make an appearance and leave,” He says as he and Jack start up the stairs.

“Sounds good by me. I can’t wait to get out of this monkey suit.” Jack’s in his Army dress blues, instead of a regular suit, and he looks as uncomfortable as Mac. “Only people I really know here are gonna be Charlie Robinson and the Delta boys.” Mac knows Jack is exaggerating. He’s buddies with half the guys who come, as a matter of fact, he’s the one who was able to talk these grizzled war vets into a shindig like this. Mac knows a lot of them were worried that it was going to be all just for show, just to give Mac some good press. But now, they look forward to getting together every year. And Jack’s always down for grabbing a beer and rehashing the same old war stories with them. _But he wants me to feel better if I get overwhelmed and have to leave early._ Not that half the guys in the room haven’t been there too.

Mac blinks; even from a distance the lights and voices are a lot after being inside his house for the better part of two months. He’s immediately surrounded by reporters, and he takes a few steps back, overwhelmed. The cameras are flashing, but the sudden bright pops look too much like gunfire and explosions. _Please tell me they don’t mob the vets like this._ Mac figures he’s a target because...well, because he’s news. But the world is starting to get a little shaky, and he can smell sand and blood.

And then Jack is there, pushing the reporters away, yelling about bloodthirsty, disrespectful parasites and telling them there will be plenty of photos courtesy of the company PR office in the morning.

Jack ushers him into the open room. Inside, Mac starts to adjust. The lights aren’t painfully bright, the music is soft and fairly slow, and it’s not the chaos of some of the galas he’s been forced to attend over the years. Their planning crew are good at making sure the combat veterans here won’t be overwhelmed.

A few of the guys who know Jack come over right away. They’re nice about not making Mac feel stressed, they all leave after a few minutes of saying hi. And no one brings up anything that happened. They know that if Mac wants to talk about it, he will.

Jack’s Delta team have showed up, and Mac ends up chatting with Thorpe for a while about how his prosthetics are handling his recent move to Oregon, and whether they’ll need to be worrying about damp conditions affecting performance. It feels good to talk about stuff like that, even though Mac saw Thorpe on the chopper that pulled him out of Afghanistan. All Jack’s buddies look like they’re relieved to see Mac out here, even though they don’t bring it up. But he can tell in the smiles and handshakes.

When Charlie Robinson, the former EOD guy who beta tested some of Mac’s work after losing an arm and half a leg to an IED, wanders over, Mac can’t stop himself from asking. “Did you know anyone named Alfred Pena?”

Charlie smiles widely. “Hell yeah I did. Best EOD training officer I ever had. He was tough, but he was determined to see us all make it out of there alive. And I owe him my life a hundred times over.” He sighs. “I heard what happened. And for what it’s worth, thanks for the closure, Mac. I know all of us that knew him...well, finally knowing something, anything, made it possible to move on.”

“I want to see his family.” Mac’s been thinking of that for a while. They’ve moved back to Arizzona to live with Pena’s wife’s family, and Mac hasn’t been up for that much travel, but he needs to see them himself.

“I know she’d want to meet you. I talk to her a lot, she was always asking if anyone knew anything more about you. I think when Pena adopted you, his whole family did, just like every one of his EOD guys.” He smiles. “She’d be glad to know you’re on the mend.” Mac just nods. There’s that ache in his chest again, and he likes to tell himself it’s the arc reactor, but he knows better. _Pena had a family to come home to. And he never made it back._ But he guesses knowing what happened is something. _His little girl won’t grow up wondering what happened to her father. If he’s ever going to just walk through the door again and fix everything._ He shakes his head, pushing the pieces of his childhood that want to come back firmly aside.

Jack and Charlie are catching up, talking and laughing. Mac steps back a little, heading for the bar where Riley’s sitting, nursing a small cocktail and talking with Billy Colton, the bartender. Mac ran across “Mama” Colton’s catering service a few years ago when he was helping with hurricane relief in Georgia, and when he offered them a contract for his company events, they jumped on it. Mac’s pretty sure Riley and Billy have some on-again-off-again thing, but he’s never asked.

“That’s a really nice dress.” Mac says, sitting down next to her.

“This is why you don’t have a girlfriend,” Riley says, smirking. “You suck at compliments. Or you make element puns no one without a PhD understands.”

Mac shakes his head. “The right girl will.” But now he’s not sure that’s ever in his future. He hasn’t talked to Nasha since everything. _She deserves better than a traumatized, broken person._

“Hey Mac, good to see you here, man!” Bozer wanders up, holding his camera and smiling, then glances at Riley. “You look stunning,” he whispers. He tugs at his bowtie. “Do you want to dance…”

“Sure.” Riley hops off the bar stool. “Watch my drink, will you, Mac? It’ll at least keep you off the dance floor and save some poor innocent’s toes.” She follows Bozer out into the crowd, and the two of them look happy. Mac smiles. He’s thought they’d be perfect for each other since they first met and Boze tried to con Riley’s phone number out of her.

He’s still staring after them when someone suddenly interrupts his line of vision. A small woman with long dark hair and a shimmery blue dress, who just stole Riley’s bar stool. She holds out a hand to him.

“Agent Webber.” The woman is sitting tensely, watching the room with the practice of someone who’s used to needing to protect themselves. It’s the kind of look Jack has. The one Mac sees in the mirror sometimes now. “I know this is a trying time, but we need to debrief you. There are a lot of unanswered questions.” Mac was afraid of this. He doesn’t want to talk about Afghanistan, he doesn’t want to think of what happened there.

“Right here?” If she makes him talk now, in an already stressful environment, he might lose it completely.

“Of course not. What I need to hear has to be kept strictly confidential.” Webber looks at him, and the look in her eyes warns him she’s not here to play. “How about the 24th, at 7 pm. At your offices.”

Mac’s about to hedge, that’s only a couple days away and he’s not sure he’ll be ready. But then he sees someone he definitely wants to avoid, so he just nods and pushes his way into the crowd, making a beeline for Jack. He doesn’t quite make it before there’s a scolding voice from behind him.

“Well, your first public appearance and you’re hiding behind your guard dog.” Mac knows that voice too well, and he cringes. _Of course she’s here._

Nikki Carpenter, the most famous gossip reporter on _Vanity Fair_ ’s staff. Mac knows her a little too well. She got an exclusive with him when he first took on the company, and a little more besides. He was young and naive enough to think she actually liked him; that they were actually in love. He thinks he was, but the only thing she was in love with was her insider scoop. He got a literal rude awakening when one day she was gone, with her heavily embellished “tell-all” exclusive and a promotion. Her story about him made her career. And that stings. _I made a mistake. And now I have to be reminded of it every time I see her name._ Nikki humiliated him and broke his heart, and he’s been skittish of relationships ever since.

“You have a lot of nerve showing up here tonight.” Nikki says, the acid in her words biting.

“It’s my event, I don’t think that’s surprising,” Mac snaps back. “And I’m afraid, if you’re here to try and prove I’m some kind of traumatized basket case or whatever your readers will go wild about, you’re out of luck.”

“You’ve been a hermit too long, MacGyver. I’m not a gossip columnist anymore, I’m an investigative reporter.” Nikki pulls a handful of photos out of her purse. “Care to explain why these crates, with your company’s logos and shipping manifests, turned up in the hands of terrorists in an Afghan village, full of chemical weapons?” The next photos are the results.

Nikki yelps when Jack shoves her away from Mac and takes the pictures away from her, crumpling them in his hand. “You stay away from him, Carpenter.” Jack wasn’t there for the Nikki disaster, or it probably wouldn’t have happened in the first place, but Mac told him all about it.

Mac chokes, gasping for breath. He pushes away from both Nikki and Jack, hurrying for the door. He needs air.

He literally collides with someone on the steps. “Whoa, whoa, Angus!” Only one person calls him Angus. _Walsh_. The man’s heavy arms are steadying, and he pulls Mac aside, away from the crowds. “Hey, you okay? Looked like you were about to trip right down the steps.”

“I…” Mac shakes his head, swiping at suddenly teary eyes. “Nikki…”

“That little bitch is here?” Walsh snaps. “Listen, Mac, if you want you can blacklist her from any of your events.”

“Not that.” Mac chokes, he feels like he might throw up. _Those pictures were horrible._ “She...had pictures...of weapons. In Afghanistan. With my name on them. Someone is using the company…” he stops. Walsh’s hand is too stiff, too heavy, on his shoulder.

 _Walsh has always been a perfectionist. He used to spend hours going over every spreadsheet, every shipping manifest, when I was a kid. If I couldn’t sleep I’d go down to the lab and tinker, and he’d bring his work with him so he could do it and keep an eye on me._ Walsh is obsessed with micromanaging the company. _If there were that many crates going out, he would know…_

Mac’s grief is suddenly swallowed by a wave of anger. “Did you _know?_ ”

“Mac, don’t go digging. You get to live in your nice ivory tower. Leave the mess in the real world to me.” Walsh shakes his head.

“Are we selling weapons?” Mac needs an answer. He’s not the naive kid he was six months ago, he isn’t going to stop until he hears what he needs to. _I’m not someone to be crossed._

“What you do, Angus, well, it just isn’t financially responsible. Letting all those patent violations go, selling your technology at prices that won’t even begin to recoup losses...it isn’t a fiscally responsible way to run the company. And if you want to keep doing what you’re doing now, you need to wake up and realize that.”

“Have. You. Used. My. Company. To. Run. Guns?” Mac doesn’t think he can spell it out more clearly than that.

“You left me in charge, while you ran off all over the world. If it weren’t for me, you’d be as penniless as those people you spend your life trying to rescue.” Walsh puts his arm around Mac’s shoulders, his smile a mockery of affection and concern. “Who do you think made sure you always had a chance to get out of the country? Why do you think I was so supportive of you leaving all the time? I knew you were too naive to accept the way the world works.”

“What about my father?” Mac suddenly has a horrible thought. _What if this same thing happened and Dad wouldn’t back down?_

“Do you think I set this up alone?” Walsh shakes his head. “You think your dad was like you. But he was the mind behind half the WMDs we have today. He knew what the world was like. And he knew better than to try and fight it.” He shrugs. “The government snapped him up; offer too good to refuse. He’s probably building the latest weapons tech in one of their off the grid facilities right now.” Walsh shakes his head. “I was always better at moving the stuff than making it.”

Now Mac does feel sick. He stumbles back inside, passing a concerned Jack, and barely makes it to the bathroom before he’s sick. _Everything I thought I knew was a lie._ His whole life is a lie. _I thought I was doing something good, saving lives. But I was doing it with blood money._ What is he supposed to do now?

* * *

“Mac?” Jack stops haranguing Nikki about respecting people with trauma and turns to see his kid running back into the room, only to bolt straight for the bathroom. _Oh man._ He follows, but he doesn’t bang on the locked door until he hears the retching coughs subside.

Mac opens the door slowly, and he looks pale and wrung out and absolutely devastated. Jack steps inside, and locks the door behind them again so no one barges in to bother them. He pulls Mac against him, and lets him rest his head on Jack’s shoulder while he runs a hand through the kid’s messy hair.

“It’s okay. When you feel like it, I’ll drive you home, okay?” He doesn’t know what triggered this, but he knows enough about PTSD to know it could have been anything at all. _I’m sorry I told him he should come to this thing. That was a mistake._

“They lied to me. They all lied to me.” _What?_

“Who lied, Mac?”

“My dad, Walsh...I don’t know!” Mac’s voice rises desperately. “I don’t know who to trust anymore.” Jack really wants to know what this is all about. But there will be time for that later. Right now, his kid is distraught and scared and doesn’t know where to turn.

“I’m never gonna lie to you, Mac. I promise. Your dad was a world class jerk, and I know he messed you up real good, but I’m never leaving you, and I’m never gonna lie to you. Okay?”

“Walsh said that too. And then he sold weapons to terrorists.”

Jack knows the kid’s been through a lot lately. Hell, he’s got that freaky glowing box he whipped up out of random junk in an Afghan cave glowing through the front of his shirt. _I shoulda found him sooner._ _They never shoulda taken him._ And Mac _never_ should have had to figure out how to get himself out. Jack should have rescued him, rather than found the kid in the middle of the desert surrounded by the remains of that suit thing he made.

Jack aged ten years in the three months it took to find Angus MacGyver. He can’t imagine what it did to the kid. _He doesn’t really talk about it, but I know the aftereffects of torture when I see it._ And the kid’s told him he feels guilty about the death of his fellow prisoner, some long-missing EOD tech by the name of Alfred Pena. The guy died helping Mac get out, and Jack can’t imagine what knowing that’s done to a sensitive person like Mac. So maybe it’s just the trauma that’s got the kid freaking out.

“Come on, Mac. Jonah Walsh has been like a father to you ever since your real one skipped. He wouldn’t do that.”

There’s a steely determination in the kid’s eyes, as cold as the metal in his chest, when he pulls back and looks into Jack’s eyes. “He’s been dealing weapons under the table. Under my name. And I’m going to stop him.”


	5. Chapter 5

Mac sits on the couch, mindlessly flipping through the TV channels. He doesn’t know what to do. He could report Walsh, but it’s the word of a traumatized kid against a respected corporate leader.  _ Who would see it as anything more than my PTSD talking? _ He didn’t record Walsh’s confession, and the man would never say it again.

Jack’s making some calls, guys he knows who are still in the “sandbox” who might know more about these weapons shipments. But as far as they can tell, Walsh isn’t running the weapons for the government. He’s selling them to terrorists. 

Mac would prefer that no one had their hands on the things he saw in Nikki’s photos. But the worst imaginable outcome is them being used on innocent civilians by people like the ones who kidnapped him. 

And the the channel lands on a reporter who’s standing in an all too familiar expanse of sand and rock. Mac wants to turn away, but something in him can’t. 

“I’m standing here at the edge of a living hell, a modern day Heart of Darkness. A militant group known as the “Ten Rings” has turned the town of Gulmira into a martial state.” Mac cringes at the images of armed men storming into buildings, firing on anyone hiding inside. “Their only contact with the world so far has been a message insisting that they will begin a new world order, starting here. And if what we have seen of their new order is any indication, the future they imagine is grim.” 

Mac glances down at the table in front of the TV where he left the fight stabilizer he was tweaking. The disassembled glove section of the suit is spread out there. Mac blinks. Despite the fact that he made as many modifications to the suit as he did, the fact remains that at its core, it’s still the same thing he used to fight his way out of that cave, to blow up an entire weapons cache. It’s still just as dangerous. 

_ I just built a weapon.  _

The reporter wraps up her speech with a line she clearly intended to deliver a powerful punch. “There’s very little hope for these refugees. People who can only wonder who, if anyone, will help them.” 

Maybe he’s not going to put that suit in storage after all.  _ The government can’t go in there, it’s too much of a risk. But someone unaffiliated could try. _ He picks up the glove and begins reassembling it, then heads downstairs. Jack is still on the phone, maybe Mac can be gone before he notices.

He’s barely stepped into the staging area before he hears Jack’s combat boots clumping on the stairs. “Mac? What are you doin’ down here, kid?”

There’s no point in lying, half the suit’s on already. And Jack isn’t going to leave unless he leaves with Mac. 

“I’m going to find those weapons. And I’m going to destroy them.”

“Mac…”

He pushes Jack’s hands away, before the metal gauntlets are slid over his own. “I can’t live with myself if I don’t do something.” 

“Then I’m coming with you.”

“You can’t. I only have one suit made.”

“You’re not serious.”

Mac would be lying if he said part of him (the part that’s now paralyzingly terrified of heights) wasn’t wishing he’d never made that promise. “It’s the only way to get there fast and undetected. I can’t use a company jet now, not knowing Walsh is the mastermind behind all this.” 

“Mac, I’m supposed to watch your back. Letting you go alone ain’t right. I can’t just sit here.” Mac has the feeling Jack isn’t going to just sit around no matter what; he’s already pacing. 

“I need you to get in touch with anyone you know who’s monitoring air traffic over there. See if you can keep the sky clear for me.”  And then, before Jack can protest, he snaps the faceplate down and takes off. 

This is the most terrifying thing he’s ever done. But he can’t leave those people to be killed. Especially not when this is his fault. 

Mac doesn’t think flying will ever not scare the hell out of him. But S.P.A.R.K.I. is doing all the work, which makes him feel marginally better. This time he’s not going to take them off autopilot. 

He’s got the location locked in, and he’s hoping to come down on the outskirts of the town. Attract as little attention as possible. He’s just starting his descent when something slams into him. An explosion, muffled by his chestplate, jars his whole body, and he tumbles downward, spiraling uncontrollably until he hits sand. 

Falling still hurts. Mac pulls himself up slowly, wincing at the aches that have spread across his back and legs from impact. He thinks he can actually see what hit him, a high-powered tank.  _ They probably think they took care of me. _ He creeps carefully around the low buildings between him and the vehicle, then slips underneath, disables the gearbox, and uses the laser he built into the suit to weld the top hatch closed. He can hear the confusion inside.  _ I’ll make sure someone shows up to deal with them later. _

The closer he gets to the center of town, the more gunfire, shouts, and screams he hears. He can see his breathing and heart rate spiking on the heads up display.  _ You don’t have time to be scared, to have flashbacks. You can do something now. No one else has to die like Pena did. _

Mac steps around a corner...and comes face to face with one of the men who tormented him in that cave. The shock is enough to send him stumbling backward, tripping over rubble. Fortunately, the stabilizers kick in, keeping him from falling.

The man yells something, and the armed guards behind him snatch women and children from the truck they were loading and pull them in front of them, aiming guns at their victims’ heads and shouting. Mac can tell they’re trying to force him to surrender. 

He lowers his hands, but twitches his fingers enough to engage the wide-range pulse from the stabilizers. The next second, a shockwave ripples across the whole city square, knocking everyone backward. By the time the men realize what’s happened, Mac’s pulled them away from the people they were taking, and tied them all to the rails of their own vehicle with their gun straps. 

He can’t see the one who was the leader.  _ If he gets away, this starts all over.  _ He engages S.P.A.R.K.I.’s signal scanner on a hunch, and sees that in one of the abandoned houses, someone is trying to make a cell phone call.

Mac punches through the wall, grabs the man by the shoulder, and flings him to the ground in the middle of the group of shocked townspeople. “He’s all yours,” Mac says, before engaging the flight mode and taking off. He doesn’t think too long about what might happen now. 

He’s taken care of the insurgents, without a leader they’ll have no central command, and they’ll more than likely flee.

But he still has to take care of the weapons. Once he’s far enough above the town, he engages scanners, and swoops low over each stockpile, emitting small pulses that render detonation systems useless. If the area is unpopulated and the weapons aren’t chemical ones, he simply explodes them.

It’s when he sees the ones in the hills outside the town that Mac stops cold. Five Jericho missiles are perched above the town, aimed and ready to fire at the road approach.  _ If anyone came to help, they were going to blow them up.  _

“Engage Faraday dampers.” Mac’s latest modification has been protecting the suit from EMP shockwaves. The experimental tech is eventually going to go into hospitals in active war zone areas, to keep them running even if an EMP weapon is deployed, but testing it on the small scale of the suit seemed like a good idea. Now he’s really glad he did. 

Mac aims a powerful blast at the missiles, and one after another, they snap in a whirl of sparks. The pulse he’s using won’t detonate the payload, but it is frying out the guidance systems. 

He’s about to shoot the last one when he realizes it...isn’t there. He glances up just in time to see the missile heading straight for him. He doesn’t have time to shoot, only to deploy flares. The missile explodes almost directly on top of him, and Mac freefalls for scarily long seconds until the autopilot levels out. He’s insanely thankful for those Faraday dampers now, if his suit hadn’t been still running, he would have crashed and been trapped out here in the desert again.

Suddenly, a small red alert begins blinking in the corner of his heads-up display, and Mac freezes. 

“What is that?”

“Freefalling object. Please clear the area.” He looks up at the sky to see a dark speck whirling down, and when the computer zooms it in, he flinches. That’s a plane. A fighter jet. 

This must be a test pilot. Jack was supposed to warn military bases to pull their planes out of the area, but they probably assumed he meant ones that would fire on someone. A test pilot wasn’t going to be a problem, in their opinion. And he wouldn’t have been, if blowing a Jericho missile hadn’t released an EMP that knocked out his plane. 

Mac ignores the blinking proximity alert and flies straight for the plane. A smaller shape appears above it, the pilot probably ejected. Mac slows up, watching for the parachute. There isn’t one. The falling shape passes his altitude and continues plummeting to the ground.

The parachute isn’t engaging and in seconds this man is going to die. Mac dives after him, ignoring the sickening drop in his stomach at falling for the third time today, this one purposeful and fast.  _ If I crash, I crash. I’m going to try and save him. _

The man, Mac can see his nametag reads Lt. Cmdr. R. Reese, is staring at him in absolute shock. Mac just reaches for the failsafe and slams it as hard as he can. The parachute unfurls, and Mac is flung away as the pilot’s descent is abruptly halted. The suit kicks in stabilizers, and he watches his dangerously elevated vital signs retreat until the display in his visor is more greens than reds.

_ It’s okay. Everyone is okay. _ He turns and engages autopilot again. “Take me home, S.P.A.R.K.I.”

* * *

“I designed it to come off.” Mac winces as Jack tugs on part of the chestplate, then starts levering on it with a long screwdriver. “It worked fine last time.”

“Yeah, because last time it wasn’t dented and warped and beat to hell, Mac.” Jack shakes his head. “You’re not doing this again. At least not without me. Geez, kid, it looks like you caught a grenade to the chest.”

“Um...tank shell.” Mac shrugs, or tries to. Everything hurts and the suit, half disassembled, is hard to move in. 

“You’re lucky you’re not dead. I’d have killed you.”

“You do realize that makes no sense, right?” Mac chuckles, then stops when that makes his battered chest ache. He just wants to sleep for a week. 

“Oh my God!” He flinches at the startled exclamation, and turns to see where it’s coming from. Riley and Bozer are standing at the top of the steps.  _ Oh no.  _ It’s bad enough that Jack knows Mac is doing this. He doesn’t need them all worrying about him. 

“Let’s face it, this is  _ not _ the weirdest thing you’ve caught me doing.” He’s pretty sure nothing is going to top the automated bagel toaster disaster. 

“Are those...bullet holes?” Bozer asks, face white. 

Mac knows he can’t lie to them.  _ I’ve been lied to my whole life. I can’t do that to the people I care about.  _

“Yes.” He tries to give them the succinct version of what he knows, in between winces and gasps as Jack and the robots work more parts of the suit free. 

Both Boze and Riley are as in denial as Jack was. But Mac has images of the crates, with the shupping manifests, that he scanned before he blew them up. The visuals are detailed enough that he can get the registration numbers. And when Riley punches them into the network, the shipping papers show up with Walsh’s signature on every single one. And most of them are handwritten in pen, not even electronic.  _ There’s no way to say he didn’t know. _

“We can take this to authorities, right?” Riley asks. 

“No,” Jack replies. “Mac got that information on an unsanctioned mission into an uncleared operation zone, as a civilian. If he admits to that, they throw the book at him and Walsh both.” Mac shrugs. He wouldn’t particularly mind if taking down Walsh’s operation landed him prison time as well, but they do have an alternative. 

“Riley, I need you to hack into Walsh’s computer and get me the records of every weapons sale he’s made.”

“And when I do, what then?” Riley looks at him with wide, tearful eyes.

“I’m going to track down every last shipment, and destroy them.”

“You’re going to kill yourself, Mac. And I won’t be a part of that.” Her hands are shaking. “I thought we lost you once. It almost killed me. It almost killed all of us.”

“I promise, I’ll be safe.” Mac glances at her. “Once you have that information, you can leak it to anyone you want. Anonymously. But I can’t wait for all the government red tape and investigations; the people Walsh sold to could use those weapons at any time. I need to get rid of them fast. But once that’s over, it’s over. And I’ll put the suit away.” 

Riley nods slowly and tearfully. And then she stands up and walks away. 

* * *

Riley’s been one of the white hats for a long time. But there was a point when it looked like she was more likely to be doing hard time than managing a billion-dollar company.  _ I was hacking the NSA before I graduated high school. _

Her keycard lets her in any office in the building, one of the perks of being the person who installs new software. Walsh is out, as usual, probably in another of the never ending meetings. She heads straight for his computer and logs in. 

His incriminating files are probably on a ghost drive, so they wouldn’t show up in scheduled maintenance scans of the computer. Not that that’s going to stop Riley. Her fingers are flying.  _ Mac was right when he said those weapons could be deployed at any time. Those terrorists aren’t waiting around for us to find out about them. The sooner we end this, the more people we save.  _ Even though the thought of Mac going back to somewhere he came home from half dead,  _ twice, _ is horrifying. 

She starts transferring files, to Mac’s computer and her own, from which she’ll upload anything relevant to the server run by one of the hacking organizations she was part of back in the day. “Rising Tide” will be surprised to see “Artemis 37” back online, but they’ll be more than happy to expose Wlash’s gun-running. Some of the files are shipping manifests, some of them schematics...that look scarily like what Mac describes the original version of his suit as...and one video. The video is taking forever to load, and when Riley opens it to try and condense the file even more, it begins to play. 

She has to raise the screen brightness all the way to see what’s happening in the video. When she is able to make it out, she shudders, her whole body feeling icy. It’s Mac, laying still and pale, aside from the blood spattered on him, on a cot bed. His shirt is gone and there are deep, red wounds all over his chest.  _ This is before they tried to get the shrapnel out and put in the magnet.  _ She wants to cry when the person holding the camera digs a finger into one of the biggest wounds and Mac lets out a weak whimper. 

_ Don’t touch him. _ Even though she knows this is in the past, that there’s nothing she can do about it now, she wants to reach through the screen and pound whoever hurt her little brother to a bloody pulp. Mac tries to squirm away from the hand, and gasps softly, whimpering again, when the movement jars all his shrapnel wounds. Riley bites her lip. Watching him suffer, helpless to do anything, is torturing  _ her. _

And then it looks like the camera has been set down, still pointed at Mac, who’s shuddering in pain and gasping shallowly for every breath. “Unfortunately for you, the person you asked me to kill survived our initial attack. And I think he might be more useful to me alive than dead. Jonah Walsh, the price to kill Angus MacGyver has just gone up.” Riley gasps. 

She clicks out of the video, horrified, just as it finishes uploading. A final file appears in its place, with US government watermarks, and Riley goes stiff when she sees what it says.

Walsh signed for everything the military recovered from the desert to be delivered to company storage. He was studying the original suit. Probably planning to recreate it. 

She needs to go before Walsh gets back; her phone just notified her his keycard entered the building. She carefully clicks out of all the files, and erases the trace of her presence on the computer. 

She’s just closing the door to the penthouse offices when someone steps up beside her. Riley jumps, she didn’t see anyone there a second ago. 

“Miss Davis?” It’s the woman from that agency with the ridiculous name. 

“Agent Webber.”

“We had a meeting.” The woman’s voice is crisp. “Did you forget about our meeting?”

“We can have it now. Come with me.” Riley’s phone just pinged her that Walsh isn’t coming to his office. He’s going down, into the basement, to the labs. After seeing those schematics, she has a very bad feeling about this. 

She tries to rapidly bring the woman, who insists on being called Matty, up to speed as they walk. Matty’s a quick study, and when she hands over her phone so the woman can see the proof for herself, she finds herself struggling to keep up with Matty’s stride.  _ She’s scarily fast. _

“Where is Walsh now?” Matty asks. 

Riley takes back her phone and consults it. “Sector 16. Cold Storage.” The area under the arc reactor is where they keep anything they’re not currently working on. There’s stuff down here that’s been there since before Riley joined the company. 

Riley swipes her access badge, but the system only beeps, the denial tone she’s gotten used to not hearing. “That’s not right,” she mutters, swiping again. When that doesn’t allow her access, she pulls out her phone, taps it against the scanner, and begins typing. Matty watches her in a way that Riley thinks is a little too knowing.  _ Did she do a background check on me?  _ Mac pulled strings to get her criminal record expunged, but she knows those things don’t disappear completely if you know where to look.  _ This agency must really be invested in knowing about us. _

The door slides open with a soft whoosh, and when Riley looks back at Matty, she sees that the woman is holding a gun.  _ How did she get that past security?  _ Riley’s met a lot of interesting people so far, but Matty is by far the one who’s piqued her curiosity the most, the woman could have stepped right out of a James Bond movie. 

Riley’s not sure where in Cold Storage Walsh will be. She peeks around the edges of shelving, and then she sees something propped in a corner. The suit from Afghanistan. She’s never seen it in person, and seeing the battered, hand-forged metal makes her heart ache.  _ Mac did all this in a cave, with scraps.  _ She’s so proud of him for surviving something that should have killed him. 

And then she hears something, rattling in a corner. She glances over, and there’s just time to see a dim blue glow before something  _ huge _ towers over them. “Run!”


	6. Chapter 6

Mac is exhausted. He feels like he hasn’t slept in days, and the aches from what happened at Gulmira are starting to make themselves felt in full force. He wants to lie down and sleep for a week, but he knows that as soon as Riley finishes transferring him the intel, he needs to go back to work. And he has to have the suit ready by then. Bozer is out handling PR on the reports of a “metal man” sighting. They need to keep this quiet, so Walsh doesn’t have time to react before they strike. 

He’s bent over his desk when there’s a strange buzzing sound in his ear and he feels himself go stiff. Then someone leans down and whispers next to his ear.

“Maybe this time we can have a civil conversation, Angus.” Walsh steps into his field of vision.  _ How did he get in here? Jack should have seen...Jack, what happened to Jack? _

He must have mumbled that out loud, because Walsh holds up a small glowing sticklike device. “Don’t worry, Papa Bear’s only going to wake up with a headache. Temporary paralysis.” Walsh grins eerily. “Guess you didn’t know your dad was working on this when you were a kid.” 

Mac wants to yell, but his voice feels stuck in his throat. He’s utterly helpless as Walsh pushes his chair back from the desk, unbuttons the collar of his shirt, and runs a finger over the arc reactor’s protective cover. 

“When I arranged to have you disappear in Afghanistan, I worried I was killing the golden goose. But it was just fate you survived the hit on you. You had one last golden egg to give.” And then Walsh twists the reactor sideways. It pops free of the latches in the casing and there’s a tug as the attachment to the baseplate catches. Mac feels Walsh reach inside and dig around with some tool, and then he’s holding the reactor in his hand. 

“This is the finishing touch my suit was missing. I suppose I could have made it myself, but you were always better at that kind of thing. Really, I think it’s your most impressive work yet. Pity you won’t be around to enjoy the acclaim.” And then he disappears. 

Mac gasps shallowly for breath. It’s probably just his imagination, but he thinks he can feel the metal shards starting to crawl back toward his heart again. But that’s not what’s going to kill him first. Like he told Riley earlier, his heart will stop without the electricity from the reactor. His body has learned to depend on it, some kind of human-machine symbiosis that Jack would probably freak out over. If he doesn’t do something soon, his heart is going to stop. He’s getting some movement back, and he thinks briefly about attaching another car battery as a temporary stopgap, but the magnet isn’t in there anymore and he doesn’t have the time or the steady hands to build a new one.

Mac tries desperately to think.  _ What did I do with the old reactor? _ He told Riley not to take it to company storage, he kept it here, hidden...The third drawer in the toolbox. He lined it with lead when he was working on some other radioactive experiment years ago, he figured it would be fine to put the reactor in there. 

Mac drags himself across the floor toward the toolbox. There’s a car creeper in the way, and he pulls himself up onto it. It takes a little less effort to roll himself across the floor than to crawl. 

He reaches up, but the drawer takes so much effort to pull open. He sinks back to the floor, panting, darkness shimmering in the edges of his vision.  _ I just need to rest a little, then try again... _

“Mac? Mac?” Jack is leaning over him, shaking him. Mac blinks blearily. He’s so tired, he just wants to sleep… “Mac, I’m so sorry, he got the jump on me. Talk to me bud, what have I gotta do?”

“Drawer...third from bottom.” Mac pants out, before flopping back to the ground. He hears Jack open it and rummage around. 

“Got it!” Now everything sounds so far away, and he’s just so tired...“Mac!” Jack shouts. “Mac, what do I do now?”

“Can’t…” Mac gasps. Jack’s hand won’t fit in the sleeving. Mac is going to have to do this himself. He takes a deep breath, and a mental image of Pena flickers up in front of him.  _ Don’t waste your life, Mac.  _

He forces his hand to stop shaking, and reaches down inside, attaching the connection to the baseplate. The resulting shock on his failing body drags a scream out of his still half-paralyzed lungs. 

“Mac?” Jack is leaning over him, holding him up. “Are you okay, bud? Is it okay?” Mac only nods. 

He takes a few more deep breaths, feeling his body evening out and readjusting to the reactors presence. “I sent Riley to the factory. He’s going to power up his suit there. You have to get her out.” 

“No, kid, I can’t leave you.” Jack pulls out his phone. “I’ll call security.”

“Jack, they might be in his pocket. You and Riles and Boze are the only people I trust right now. I’m gonna be okay. Just go, I can’t take it if something happens to her too.” Jack nods and stands up. Mac leans back against the toolchest. 

_ I really shouldn’t. I shouldn’t even think about it. _ But he just finished upgrading the armor for another run at Walsh’s weapons shipments, and he  _ did _ design it for use with paralyzed patients... _ Jack is gonna kill me. _ But he starts pulling himself to his feet anyway.

* * *

Mac realizes, about a mile from his house, that he doesn’t actually have to follow the roads to the factory. He’s sure Jack is there already, he took his GTO and it took Mac almost half an hour to get suited up, in the condition he was in. Thankfully, the vitals on his visor aren’t looking too bad. He’s tired and he hurts, but mostly he’s angry.  _ Walsh is going to use what I made to hurt people. That’s even worse than selling weapons under the company name. If Walsh harms a hair on Riley’s head with that suit he made, it’s on me. Because I gave him the way to power it. _

He can see Jack’s car in the parking lot, and when he scans it, the engine is still very warm.  _ He just got here. _ He wonders if Riley’s still inside…

And then the doors fly open, and he sees three people rush out. He can pick out Jack and Riley...and is that the woman from the veterans’ gala? He thinks so, he doubts he could mistake her. 

He’s about to land and ask what’s going on when he sees the asphalt in the parking lot literally begin to buckle and heave. And then a truly massive metal hand breaks free, reaching up and slamming itself down to heave a giant body out of the ground. Mac gasps. Walsh’s suit is  _ huge. _

He doesn’t have time to plan, that thing could crush all three of the others with one step. He flies down, slamming into Walsh and letting the momentum knock them both away from the parking lot, into the street. 

Mac lands hard, and every bruise flares up with pain. It takes him a split second too long to start getting up, and suddenly, he feels something crushing his chest. He’s gotten sadly used to that feeling, but this time it’s actually literal. Walsh is stepping on him. 

A signal cuts into S.P.A.R.K.I.’s comms. “I built this company from nothing. And nothing is going to stand in my way.” Walsh slams his foot down on Mac’s chest. “Not even you.” 

Mac kicks in the stabilizers...although they’re actually more of thrusters at this point...and slides out from under Walsh’s foot just as the man is about to give a finishing blow. He hovers just out of reach, he has the beginnings of an idea. He can’t possibly outfight Walsh’s suit, it’s too heavily armored and he’s too disoriented and exhausted. But his plan depends on one thing. Whether Walsh designed his suit to fly.  _ He wants to kill me, more than he wants to go back after Riley and Jack and Webber. With me, it’s personal. I can keep his attention, let them get away. And maybe even take him out. _

Mac pulls up just a little higher, and sure enough a cloud of black smoke forms underneath the feet of the other suit, and it begins to rise. More slowly, and with clearly more effort, but that’s definitely flight. 

Mac turns and takes off, heading straight upward.  _ I can’t beat him with brawn. But I just might be able to beat him with brains. And a little science.  _ Mac knows that if he can get Walsh and his suit to a high altitude, the suit will ice over.  _ I don’t want to go so high. But I have to. _ “Take us as far as we’ll go, S.P.A.R.K.I. We have to reach icing altitude.”

“The Mark I chestpiece was never designed for sustained flight. With only fifteen percent power the odds of reaching that height…”

“I know the math, just do it!” Mac won’t say he’s not terrified. But this needs to end.

“Twelve percent power.”

“Just leave it on the screen. Don’t keep telling me!” and then he feels something pulling him backward. A huge hand has grabbed his ankle. And Walsh’s voice pops into the comms again.

“Nice try, but my suit is more advanced in every way.” Mac focuses on the stars overhead.  _ Just a little higher.  _ “You built a tool. I built a weapon. And Angus, someday you were just gonna have to learn the hard way, a weapon is always going to win.” 

“What about the ice?” Mac asks, and he grins when he sees that the systems in Walsh’s suit are flickering. “Yeah, didn’t think you took that into consideration.” And then Walsh’s suit becomes deadweight and they’re both falling fast, the hand frozen onto Mac’s ankle. He leans down and slams a fist against it, and the metal creaks and releases. He stops, hovering.

And then a red warning light flashes on his visor and he starts falling, the stabilizers flickering every few moments to slow his descent. “We are now running on emergency backup power.” 

He hovers down, toward the roof of the factory. He’s just glad they’re still above LA.  _ Wonder where Walsh fell to? _ He starts removing his helmet, the air supply will go dead in a couple minutes. And then something catches him in the ribs, flinging him across the roof. There’s a heavy, familiar laugh.  _ He’s not dead. _

Mac dodges behind an air conditioner unit. Hopefully hiding will buy him a little time. Mac is exhausted, and his suit is drained. He can’t hope to keep fighting. But he does have one last option. He squeezes his fingers together, the shortcut he built in for calling Jack’s number. 

Jack picks up on the first ring. “Hey, kiddo, you okay? I saw you both take off, and it looked like Walsh was fallin’ a minute ago.”

“It’s not over. Is Riley there?” 

“Yeah, I’m right here Mac.”

“I need you both to help me.” Mac swallows. “You have to overload the reactor and blow the roof.”

“How?” Jack asks.

“Riley, you need to deactivate the computerized failsafes. Jack, open all the switches and throw the master control main. But wait until I’m clear of the roof. It’ll fry everything up here.” He thinks he might still be able to get away. 

And then a massive hand reaches down and grabs him, squeezing his chest. Mac bites back a scream of agony as he feels parts of the suit break and dig into his body. Walsh holds him up, flipping back the chestplate of his own suit so he and Mac are face to face. “You finally outdid yourself, Angus. You’d have made your father proud.”

Mac squirms, then thinks of something. He manages to work one hand free enough to set off the emergency flares. The small shower of sparks flashes up in Walsh’s face, and he drops mac, stumbling backward. Mac turns, hoping he still has enough power for one flight, but then a heavy kick sends him spinning across the roof, crashing through the glass skylight above the reactor. 

He hears Jack’s voice from below him. “It’s ready! Mac, get off the roof!”

Walsh readies a small missile on his suit’s shoulder. “You know, it’s ironic, Angus. Trying to rid the world of weapons you gave it the best one ever. And now, I’m gonna kill you with it.”

“Hit the button!” Mac shouts

“You told me not to!” Jack yells.

“Just do it!”

“But you’ll die!” Riley shouts.  _ I know… _

“Do it now!!” He’s going to die anyway. Might as well take Walsh down with him. 

And then the world goes white. Mac is flung backward. He dimly hears someone scream, he can’t tell if it’s himself or Walsh. He’s in too much pain to try and find out. It feels like he’s burning alive. And then, he hears a truly massive explosion, and nothing else. 

He lays there on the roof, staring up at the blurry stars, wondering if that’s the last thing he’s going to see.  _ I don’t think I wasted my life. I think it was worth it.  _ Mac can faintly hear Riley and Jack yelling his name. But it’s so dark, and it hurts so much…

* * *

“Here’s your alibi.” Mac sighs. He literally just got out of Carlos’s forcibly imposed bed rest three hours ago, and already, Webber thinks he needs to do a press conference. He glances through it. Usually Bozer writes these things to fit Mac’s speech patterns. This is going to be one he stumbles through, for sure.

He glances at Boze, who just shrugs. If Mac had his guess, Boze tried to fix this and Webber scared him off with one glance. 

“There’s nothing about Walsh.”

“It’s being handled.” Webber says, and there’s a hint of satisfaction on her normally unreadable face. “This isn’t my first rodeo, Mr. MacGyver.” 

“Wait, does that mean there really were aliens at Broom Lake?” Jack asks. “Are you the men in black who take care of that?” Webber shoots him a withering stare. Mac can already tell there will be bad blood between those two for a long time.  “The...Um…Proactive…”

“Just call us P.H.O.E.N.I.X.”

Mac smiles a little, and then he realizes it’s almost time. He readjusts the sling supporting his left arm, Walsh left him a little souvenir, a busted collarbone. Mac still feels responsible for the man’s death, even if he was a monster.  _ I looked up to him, my whole life. And now I killed him. _

He swallows. That can be dealt with later. Right now, he needs to do damage control and keep his suit a secret. 

He steps in front of the wall where the camera has been set up, the nice thing about technology is that he doesn’t have to give press conferences anywhere other than the comfort and peace of his own home right now. He doesn’t think he could handle the yelling and cameras. 

He glances up at the holographic view of the audience, with the first words of his prepared speech superimposed on them. “The truth is…” And then he stops, feeling like his throat is as paralyzed as it was by Walsh’s little machine. 

There have been too many lies in Mac’s life already. Lies that almost got him and everyone he loves killed. He won’t be responsible for any more.

“The truth is...I am Iron Man.” 


	7. Post-Credits...

Mac can’t sleep. Not that that’s not a common occurrence, but he’s been so exhausted lately this is a surprise. Maybe he just needs a drink of water. 

He stumbles down the hall to the kitchen, and then stops cold at the sight of someone in a black coat standing there, like they’ve been waiting for him. Whoever it is is staring out the front windows at the view over the city. Mac takes a step back, but the person must have heard him already.

“My agent thinks I should bring you in on charges of reckless endangerment.” The voice belongs to a woman. “What you did today was dangerous. You’ve put yourself at risk, and more than that, you’ve allowed the world to believe heroes exist.”

“I won’t apologize for giving them the truth.” Mac figures this woman is probably Webber’s boss, from P.H.O.E.N.I.X. He wonders what dark hole they’re going to fling him into. He steps up a little closer, and he can see her profile now, sharp features and severely pulled up black hair. 

“Personally, I find that admirable, if foolishly brave. In a world built on lies, I’ve learned to appreciate the value of the truth. And of someone who is willing to do the right thing. Which is why I think you deserve some truth in return.” 

The woman turns around, and Mac jumps when he realizes the eye he couldn’t see is covered with a black patch. 

“Welcome to a bigger world, Angus MacGyver.” 

  
  



End file.
